I have to tell you about the moment I watched a clip of the Fortnite Travis Scott concert from 2020 and felt genuinely moved, because this is not the reaction I expected to have and I think it's worth being honest about.
The "fortnite moments" trend has been everywhere on TikTok lately and I've been posting about it, and people have sent me their own memories and it's become this unexpectedly emotional conversation. Let me give you mine first, and then we'll get into what I actually think is happening with games as venues, because there's something real there I want to talk about.
I am thirty-two years old and I do not play Fortnite with any regularity or skill. I have touched a controller twice. But I watched a compilation of the Travis Scott Astronomical concert and the thing that got me was not the spectacle (though the spectacle is genuinely something, a hundred-foot animated rapper walking through a psychedelic landscape while millions of people watch from their bedroom floors) it was the chat. The chat running alongside the clip was people describing where they were when they watched it originally. Some of them were thirteen. Some were in lockdown apartments in 2020. Some were watching with siblings they couldn't see in person. The event wasn't just an event. It was a shared location in time for people who had nowhere else to go.
That's a venue. That's what a venue is for.
Concerts Inside a Game: Why This Is Significant
As a musician, I have very particular feelings about live music and what it's for. I believe in it the way some people believe in church, with the same conviction actually, which is maybe not surprising given my specific history with church. The live performance is the irreducible thing. The place where something happens between people in a room that cannot be replicated by a recording or a stream. The shared breath, the collective attention, the room that fills up with something when the thing goes right.
I did not think a video game could replicate that. I was wrong, and I've been thinking about why I was wrong and what it means.
The Fortnite concerts, Astronomical being the most significant, but there have been others, the Ariana Grande Rift Tour, various DJ and artist collaborations, did something specific that regular live events can't do. They had no capacity limit. The Travis Scott concert had over twelve million concurrent attendees across its run. No physical venue holds twelve million people. The geography of participation was global. A kid in rural wherever could be at the same event as someone in Seoul, because the event existed in space that is not bounded by real-world infrastructure.
The experience is different from being in a room, the audio and the physical presence aren't there in the same way. But something else IS there: simultaneity. The fact that these millions of people were in the same place at the same time, watching the same thing, their characters all present in the same virtual field. That's not nothing. That's actually the most basic definition of an event: a shared moment in time between people who chose to be there together.
The Social Square It Became
The thing people don't usually talk about when they talk about Fortnite's cultural impact is the way it became a social space independent of its competitive game function. Especially in 2018 through 2020, and then again during lockdown, Fortnite was where a lot of kids' social lives happened. They weren't playing to win every session. They were hanging out. Running around the map. Goofing off with emotes. Being in the same virtual space as their friends when they couldn't be in the same physical space.
This is genuinely novel as a social infrastructure. The closest historical analog I can find is the shopping mall, a space that was nominally for one purpose but became primarily a social space where young people congregated because it was a venue where congregating was possible and reasonably free of adult supervision. The mall made teenagers visible to each other in a structured physical space. Fortnite made them visible to each other in a structured digital one.
And unlike the mall, Fortnite had concerts. It had live events. It had things that happened at specific moments that you either witnessed or you missed. That temporal structure, the FOMO architecture, created shared cultural touchstones for the generation that grew up playing it. When "fortnite moments" trends on TikTok, what's actually happening is a generation identifying the events that organized their shared cultural memory. "Where were you when the Black Hole happened." "Did you see the Travis Scott concert." These are the generational reference points, structured the same way older generations reference live TV events or concerts in physical venues.
the clutch fail problem and why it's relatable
Okay I need to talk about clutch fails because the fortnite moments trend is also full of them and they are genuinely, universally funny in a way that transcends not knowing anything about the game.
A clutch fail, for the uninitiated, is when you're the last person in a competitive match, you have a real chance to win, your teammates are counting on you or you're playing solo and it's down to you, and then something goes catastrophically wrong in the most spectacular possible way. You fall off a structure you built. You run into the storm by accident. You manage to defeat your final opponent and then immediately die to your own poorly-timed explosive. You win the game and then proceed to immediately be eliminated anyway through some impossible sequence of events.
These moments go viral not because failure is funny in a mean way, but because the gap between effort and outcome is relatable to every single person alive. You tried hard. You were SO CLOSE. You did everything right and then the universe inserted a banana peel specifically for you at the exact worst moment. That's not a gaming experience. That's being a person.
I relate to this from a recording perspective more than I probably should. There are sessions where you're trying to nail one specific take, one phrase in one song, the exact delivery of one line that you can HEAR in your head and keep nearly getting, and every time you get close something goes wrong. You crack the note. The phrasing is right but the emotion is off. You get the emotion right and you hear the interface noise in playback that means the whole take is unusable. The clutch fail is a universal experience dressed in a game's clothes.
what games as venues mean for music
I think about this from a musician's long-term perspective. What does it mean that concert experiences are starting to happen in gaming contexts, and that those experiences are reaching audiences that physical venues can't reach?
It means the definition of a venue is expanding in ways that the music industry has not fully caught up with. A venue is a place where an audience and a performance meet. That place doesn't have to be physical. The performance doesn't have to be the artist's physical body in real-time, though I still believe that's the irreducible version. The experience of presence, of being-there-together, can be constructed in digital space in ways that are real for the people in them.
For an independent artist like me, closet studio, limited touring budget, trying to build an audience from the ground up, the question of where people can encounter the music is central to everything. Physical venues have gatekeeping: capacity, geography, ticket prices. Digital venues, at least in their early form, have different gatekeeping but less of it. A concert in Fortnite that twelve million people attended simultaneously is not something I can replicate, and I'm not trying to. But the logic of it, reach people where they are, in the spaces they already inhabit, in contexts that feel native to them, is something I'm thinking about constantly as I work on the record.
The fortnite moments people are nostalgic for right now aren't just about the game. They're about a period when something genuinely new was figured out: that games could be places where millions of people had shared cultural experiences, and that those experiences could mean as much as experiences in physical spaces. That's significant. That's going to keep mattering. I want to understand it well enough to make something real inside it, whatever form that eventually takes.
For now I'll just watch the clutch fail compilations and feel personally attacked by all of them. It's the most productive research I've done this week.
I keep returning to this: a lot of what we call "real" culture is just culture that has accumulated enough prestige and distance from its origins that we've forgotten it was also made by people who didn't have permission. Jazz was noise. Rock was a moral panic. Hip-hop was dismissed for its entire first decade of existence by the institutions that now put it in museums. The fortnite moments people are nostalgic for, the concerts, the clutch fails, the events that became generational reference points, are the real cultural material of a generation, and the fact that the medium is a game does not change that.
When those kids are forty and someone asks them "where were you when..." the answers will include Fortnite. Not because the game was the point, but because the game was where life was happening for a formative stretch of years, and the things that happened inside it were real in the ways that matter: shared, felt, remembered. That's the whole definition of culture. That's all it ever was.