Manufactured Discontent and Fortnite 

I love how we’re moving into an age where we have to teach our children about sophisticated psychological manipulation before they’re old enough to even be curious about sex.

"Default" is now a derogatory term being used to mock players that haven't paid for skin customization.

"This is ultimately the meaning of Game-as-a-Service. Its just a euphemism for a game that takes up all your free time and becomes the only game that you play, because its just an elaborate constantly resetting Skinner Box that utilizes progression systems and seasonal competitions as a means to place you constantly in the path of an endless stream of monetary interactions." - Thank you, Folding Ideas.

I taught middle school science for a bit, and they straight up made fun of one another using the term "no skins." When they said that "no skins" don't necessarily play worse than other people, they clarified that you didn't want to be a no-skin because it meant that you were a scrub or a hack. They didn't know it, but the degree to which Fortnite had indoctrinated them into this thinking was wild to me. It's comparable to what sneakers were back in the 90's, but constantly, every day, and with an even funkier pricing model.

It's not a wave, its a cry for help.

Video game DJ: Drop your favorite emote! 60 broke kids sharing a server: *awkwardly waves at DJ*

watching this in 2021 and hearing the phrase "non-fungible" knocked the wind out of me

It’s interesting how the whole paid skins vs randomised default avatar thing creates a visible ‘class’ distinction between players. I used to defend microtransactions as long as they were just ‘cosmetic’ and didn’t affect the gameplay but, looking at how predatory and isolating these practices have become, I feel like that was a naive opinion.

That feel when you click on a video and think it's an April fools joke but then nope it's actually a carefully researched and well written video essay

the hand-waving is making me so anxious

Having grown up between the time when games were simply games and where games started to become live services, all I can say is that I’m thankful I’m old enough at this stage to recognise the majority of the predatory things highlighted in the video. To think that Fortnite is mostly aimed at young teenagers with this level of psychological manipulation and borderline warfare with social pressures and monetisation makes me really scared. I’m at least somewhat happy that these tactics are finally highlighted and being considered for regulation, because it is gambling. For kids.

"Yo lemme see your favorite emote" Jesus, he may as well be saying "Yo lemme see yo moms credit card. Yo which a you kids have spent the most money let's go!!!"

“A concert in a game? That sounds fun!” *a few minutes later* “...Oh.”

I feel like "You can enjoy what the Earth Mother gave us but that's not a replacement for a personality" is the overlooked golden quote of this video

I am an educator. During a conversation, two of my fourteen-year-old boys casually dropped the revelation that they had spend HUNDREDS of euros on Fortnite. Now I understand how that happened.

Came back to rewatch and just noticed the hidden tab jokes haha

It's nice to see some criticism of Fortnite that doesn't boil down to "I hate it because the youths like it".

Is this an April fools joke that is so obviously a joke but then turns out to actually be an insightful video? Because well played sir

"A perpetually monetized view of the future" After the NFT video that just came out, he was spot on.

"Lots of games use progression systems and incremental rewards as part of their core loop, to keep players playing. Fortnite is a maturation of those systems, a refinement of every habit-forming trick and micro-transaction pressure point developed in the last decade, condensed into a weaponized product targeted at kids." All the strongest manipulation techniques are now aimed at the most impressionable among us.

13:30 - Speaking from someone in the digital marketing ecosystem ... the terms "manufactured discontent"/"hostile design" are also known as "dark design". Look it up. I've employed it in testing. It works. It's why terms and conditions and EULA popups are massive, ungodly walls of text that numb your brain after the first sentence. It's why auto dealer ads on TV and radio have that high speed chatter listing all the legalese at the very end ("we're annoying, you can tune out now!") ... it's why sometimes, for some regions and income levels, some elements of a page may not load quickly. It's small annoyances and inconveniences that get people to do something without directly telling them to do it. And it's terrifying how effective it can be, and almost no one I know questions whether it's morally right or ethically right to be doing it.

“I kill weed names because you can enjoy what the Earth Mother gave us, but that isn’t the same as having a personality,” is one of the greatest treatises I have ever heard. Expertly thought-out and crafted. Perfect.

"I have no talk emote and I must scream"

I didn't play fortnite long. I didn't understand most of what was laid out here, but I got the feeling they were doing something sketchy. I downloaded the game, then looked around for how to customize my character, found out I can't customize or even pick premade models for free, despite that they have free models available, they just assign you one at random unless you pay them. That set off my "someone is using some sort of psychology against me" alarm and I backed the hell out of there and never looked back. After this I'm pretty sure that was a good move

I imagined Dan waving frantically in the sound booth recording this.

For those here after 1 April, 2019, the video essay begins at 5:00.

"a glimpse of the future; an awful, perpetually monetised, vertically integrated, vaguely hostile future" wow you predicted NFTs through fortnite

"It's not gambling if you can't win money." This is exactly the experience of MOST people who gamble, though.

Dude you're such a default bro Sorry, that's what my son says all the time. I will be digesting this

"Because you can enjoy what Mother Earth gave you, but that's not the same as having a personality!" *GOD D A M N ! !*

"An awful, perpetually monetized, vertically integrated, vaguely hostile future." Coming here from the Line Goes Up NFT video, 2 years later. This man is prescient.

3 years later and I know Dan doesn't do updates on his videos, but the fact that Star Wars had a canonical plot piece happen in Fortnite needs to be part of this discussion. The skinner-box FOMO pressure from one of the most popular games of all time mixed with the biggest movie franchise of all time to push engagement in a free-to-play video game whose main revenue source is nothing more than a digital funko pop collection simulator is the perfect way to describe consumer culture in the last 5 years.

I kinda see the badly hidden pain in that character's eyes as she realises in what kind of an unwelcome and greedy world she appears to be trapped being a f2p player.

when all our minds are uploaded and our bodies are in the grip of the Tencent-Amazon behemoth, you will be made to pay for dancing

"The ability to self-express is set at a premium" - and that right there is what killed my interest in Elite Dangerous... whose parent company *also* got a big fat boost from Tencent.

minecraft virtual concerts are where its at. they're entirely community-driven, lengthy third party events with lovingly made maps and stages, independent talent and far better at giving anyone a mode of expression. almost everyone 'dancing' at these events are spamming crouch or jumping around, something any player can do, not to mention you can bring your own skins (i came to nether meant 2020 as a liquid gold poppers canister). some concerts even provide a large-scale social space outside of the action, with parkour, secrets and easter eggs. they feel like a small bastion of what the internet once was, compared to fortnite's terrifying 10 minute peer-pressure light show.

That arm waving is going to drive me nuts

You know, the more we get closer to the "future", the more I long for the basic, cyberpunk-est kinds of dystopia that fiction used to present to us: They were awful, sure, but they were at least honest about it.

Another note on the FOMO piece; the items in the Battle Pass only last for the duration of the season. If you don't buy the pass and max it out, you lose everything you didn't get forever. I remember taking about a year off from the game, and I came back, realizing that I had missed an entire four or so seasons of skins that I may have wanted. I'm an adult, so I can just brush that kind of thing off, because skins and emotes and such don't really matter to me, but to a child? To a child, those things can mean the WORLD. So what will they do? They'll beg for the current pass, they'll beg for the next one, and they'll play Fortnite and only Fortnite, just like you said, just to grind and get that really neato skin at the end of the pass. And that scares me in a really primal way. I don't hate Fortnite; I like to get games in with my friends a couple times a week, I'll admit it openly. I hate the tactics they use, and the fact that those tactics are heavily directed towards an incredibly impressionable audience.

I was in Disney World and the song they were playing in a parade included the line “Come on, everybody, put your ears on!” I thought so much of this video and the “show me your favorite emote” line.

is it weird that i recognised the FOMO tactics from post-disney buyout club penguin

Every time he says the phrase "live service", I hear it in the voice of Jim Sterling, dripping with derision, and I smile a little.

Coming back to this after watching “The Line Goes Up” and hearing this video talk about a glimpse into a monetized future is kinda surreal.

On the subject of Alfonso and his lawsuit: Other games feature his dance for free, like Guild Wars 2. No problems at all. Fortnite was making a fortune off his dance. Hell I'd sue too.

Fortnite is the perfect showcase of what is actually wrong with the gaming industry. The answer isn't "SJW's pushing a PC agenda", the answer is game design choices that are driven by squeezing every last ounce of profit they can from the customer without regard to whether the game is actually good or interesting from a narrative or gameplay standpoint. Microtransactions, loot crates, early access it's all a result of late capitalism. Video games were better when they were less profitable, yet supposedly the profit motive leads to quality? Sounds like a paradox almost lol

"Players who haven't bought a skin don't even have control over their basic image. There isn't a roster of default looks to choose from. Your look is assigned randomly after every match." Wow, that does seem like a hostile design. I found the critique of game mechanics & balance interesting since I've never played it, but I also had no idea that there wasn't even a default skin. That lack of control really rubs me the wrong way, like players aren't even starting at "0", but at "-1", so-to-speak.

This video is especially amazing since I'm an older member of Gen Z. I grew up playing hoards of flash games on Newgrounds and Armor Games, but the only way to really play with other people without buying anything would be to play on one of the billions of child-friendly virtual worlds like Club Penguin and Animal Jam. Both Club Penguin and AJ had the very same psychological pushes as Fortnite does, but Fortnite pushes these to an extreme. Both Club Penguin and AJ let you customize your character, and decorate your house, but you had a limited roster of possibilities (especially with Club Penguin) unless you bought their membership subscription. In Club Penguin, you only had two different pets (or puffles) out of like 12 to choose from, and could actually wear different types of clothing, including wigs. F2Ps would have to grind to get so much as the construction hat or the Tour Guide hat, if I remember correctly. In Animal Jam, you had something like 10 out of 30 animal avatars to choose from, and you still had to grind for premium currency for some F2P avatars. Since the premium avatars were newer than the "default" F2P avatars, most people wholly preferred their designs. A grand majority of players preferred the premium arctic wolf's design over the default wolf's design. Arctic wolves were seen as all-around "cooler" characters in player social spheres. In both games, you would have to comb through membership-only wares to find anything that F2Ps could use, and were locked out of some rooms that were members-only, no matter how flashy they were. Animal Jam (and perhaps Club Penguin) would often launch with a pop-up announcement for new features, almost all exclusively available to membership subscribers, that you would have to click off of without a second thought. This phenomena always annoyed me, and it's so nice that 10 years later, I get to see that my annoyance is more than justified.

If only this made the news; instead of how video games are negatively influencing your kids, how about how corporations are greedily preying on your kids' pyscholigies. Anyone listening? Only those who care... Damn.

THOSE EYES! Those horrible eyes... They see into my soul. That waving... It never stops...

So THIS is why you've been streaming Fortnite a whole bunch

That concert sure was a glimpse of the future, alright. Just watched RTGames' recent stream where he went into Metaverse, that's the joke, actually playing and streaming it, and obviously nobody involved was uh, impressed. But the detail that stuck with me and reminded me of that Marshmallow concert was that in the in-game comedy club, well. Two details. First off, there were tables and chairs for the audience, despite the fact that everybody was a nightmarish floating torso. But also, you could only applaud the routines up on stage if you had purchased applause points with real money. Literally selling the ability to express yourself. Extremely dire.

Coming back to this vid in 2022, his points are almost prophetic. Fortnite has more or less turned into an advertisement machine for songwriters, some being literally featured in game as playable characters, while the majority are tied to emotes that play an artist's song when used. I imagine the behind the scenes looks like an artist approaching Fortnite wanting to give their next song a boost by having it be featured in Fortnite, or Fortnite approaching artists to say "hey, want to get your song and dance in front of a bunch of impressionable kids?" And compounding this with having the funny dances and songs be performed by similarly popular pop culture characters, you have this insanely effective mechanism to ensure people are buying your cosmetics in perpetuity. Have you *SEEN* Rick Sanchez doing the griddy? Look you can make Goku dance to fly and ghetto!

I think we all knew the channel was heading in this direction, I'm just glad you finally said it and made it official. My only problem is I wish you would dab more (especially at the intro and outro).

Every time you say, "live service," I hear it in Jim Sterling's voice.

Me when I first saw Fortnite being played: oh that's interestingly progressive that the default character model is female, that's different for a shooter game. Me now: Oh they did that because boys playing the game won't want to be a girl and will be more likely to buy skins so they don't have to be. great.

Tfw you realize this game is mostly played by and targeted towards young children 😟

Truly the pinnacle of Dan's RU-vid Career.

I can’t help but be struck by the similarities to real life privilege, particularly how having money makes things cheaper and peer pressure being used to get you to buy stuff you otherwise wouldn’t.

The virgin Red Vs Blue doing talking animations by having characters bobble their heads up and down vs the CHAD Folding Ideas playing Fortnite for 20 hours to unlock the hand-waving emote

as someone who doesn't play video games but experiences a lot of fomo when it comes to movies and tv shows, this video actually really helps me in terms of understanding just how engineered fomo actually is from a business and psychological standpoint.

Hearing ‘live service’ in a voice other than Jim Sterling’s is honesty kinda disconcerting.

Now we know why Henry was so judgmental about Susan playing videogames! He didn't want her to blow the $680,000 on micro-transactions!

I got tired of Overwatch and decided "Fortnite has a cool aesthetic, I'll try Fortnite" *more connection problems* *less punchy, less intuitive gameplay* *literally everything behind a paywall* *bends over backwards to make spending money on it look like a good idea* "OK, maybe losing duels to Moira isn't so bad"

"An awful, perpetually monetized, vertically integrated, vaguely hostile future" That's an extremely prescient description of Web3

"Look at that stupid default skin, I bet he just installed and has never played" "Look at that loser f2p in Team Fortress 2. I can't believe I'm playing with a bad teammate" "Look at all of these cool things you could get if you pre-ordered before the reviews about the game are out"

Why does the waving emote keep shaking like that!? Is she okay??? I can't stand her staring at me with that dead-eyed gaze oh g o d

In french we have a saying : Si c'est gratuit, c'est toi le produit ( if it's free, YOU are the product ). I think that the most important part of these games is that they are free to play. Because there is no resistance when something is free. If it was 60 bucks, a lot of parents would think twice before buying it, but it's free, so it's accessible to everyone, and especially kids without money. But then they'll grow up thinking that this model is perfectly normal, and the second they can spend a dime on it, they will. Being free is also the best excuse to push out the micro transactions and battle passes. "But the devs need to get paid", right ?

I love how your last ominous words are followed by a headshot. The bearer of bitter truth in this dystopian monetization hellscape, assassinated from a hidden location by a tencent sniper - 14 year old with a mom's credit

The joke is meta because you think it's a joke about Fortnite but actually it's a well thought out commentary on the emotionally manipulative nature of the storefront-with-a-game-attached.

That wave emote makes me incredibly uncomfortable for some reason

That was fantastic, I will be sure to show this to my son when he is older to help explain why I never let him play this game when he was a little kid. I knew it had some very questionable elements, but you really pulled back the carpet and showed all the rotted floorboards. Well done.

It's funny to revisit this after Star Wars used fortnite to show Palpatine return lol

Having never played or watched Fortnite, I didn't realize that free players have to throw their appearance back into the general pool like Unsullied do with their names.

I got to experience the 'beta run' of this model when Tencent acquired the studio that ran my favorite MOBA years ago - SMITE. I liked Hi-Rez model before that deal. It was an up-front store that sold all the microtransactions the game had to offer with a simple tier-based pricing structure where things got cheaper by dropping down in price-point after they'd been released a while. You knew what your money was worth when you bought their digital currency, it all translated directly into values that were shown up-front at all times, alongside all other options so as to have a full understanding of what something was worth. Their 'hook' at the time was the best one I've seen a F2P system use - Certain types of microtransaction content added direct value to others. You could buy a character you like, then you could buy a skin and improve the value of that first purchase by giving it more options. Then you could go on and buy a voice pack for that character, which provided more value to both the initial purchases because the skin also came with unique voice lines. The various categories of content 'layered over' each other in a way that let a player get as invested in customizing their play as they wanted to, and they could always come back later for something interesting if they didn't happen to have some extra money on hand right when something they wanted came out. Then Tencent invested in Hi-Rez and they literally introduced loot boxes within a matter of weeks, and stuffed them with trash-tier content created specifically to bloat the odds of getting anything you wanted. Then they started making high-quality content that was lootbox exclusive and came with all sorts of features no other skins in the game had up to that point. The ability to know what your in-game coins were 'worth' disintegrated practically overnight. After that it was seasonal 'Odyssey' events where you got 'points' when you bought time-exclusive content that might let you get other exclusive content at the end of the season - if you pay enough money. Which I calculated at the time to be something like $250 over three months for the really 'neat stuff' they were pushing the hardest. I was reminded of when I was a child and got the game 'Theme Park' by Bullfrog Studios for the Sega Genesis. If you wanted to make a metric shit-ton of money in that game one easy exploit was to set-up 'carnival game' booths all over your park. You'd set the prize values to the maximum, the price to enter to the maximum, and the odds of winning to the absolute minimum on every single one of them. You end up with all your guests lining up to throw money at booths that I can only imagine are, like 'Win a gold bar if you can knock over this cow using telekinetic powers'. I'd never imagined that same kind of exploit would be so effective in real life.

Oh my god the souless crazed eyes hand waving non stop just kills me

Things like this make me glad to have Asperger's and by an extension a protection from manufactured discontent, fomo, etc.

Dan succumbing to the true hierarchies with that shirt

I'm going to take a wild guess and say kids that are exposed to these gambling mechanics are not going to be great with money when they grow up.

I would like to mention for future reference that the Marsh Walk was actually an emote that everyone within the concert was able to use for free; even if you did not have it, during the duration of the concert you were able to use it.

A follow up to this discussing how the beast has evolved with the addition of way more insane creative tools for players, and the even more blatant crossover promotional opportunity machine that is fortnite festival would be super interesting!

Dan, this is the single most terrifying April Fool's I've ever had to watch and I feel an existential crisis thanks to this. Absolutely thank you.

i came for an April Fools joke and got an indepth, thought provoking looking at the Live Service format of games. This is amazing!

This is a fascinating and important topic that's been articulated very well in this video... but I cannot stop staring at the bizarre and unnerving shoulder tendon of the waving avatar. Why does it look like that?

“you can enjoy what the earth-mother gave us, but that isn’t the same as having a personality”

Why is this April fool's joke still better than anything The Quartering has ever made? Dan you absolute mad lad

Dang, that was really well made. And having come here right off catching up on the Jimquisition, oh boy do I feel a common thread here in the in-depth look at the exploitative nature of modern methods of video game monetization.

this video gets funnier to see the further we get from its release, where epic has essentially smoothed out all of the rough edges that he mentioned, creating a much more enticing game to play. As they've done that though, they've also gone even harder on D A R K P A T T E R N S and other genuinely evil practices that it gets better as a game and more concerning as a storefront.

A few years later, after the Decentraland video dissecting the concept of the metaverse, this hits a bit different. I think it's worth pointing out directly that this - the concept that you can be *here*, in a simulated space, but you're a second-class citizen with no means of self-expression, locked to only whatever unimaginative canned look the system gives you, unless you pay for it? The goal for the "metaverse," is simply that, but for every single thing in the simulation. Honestly, the only reason it's hard to read it as an elaborate allegory for being alive in a capitalist system, is that it's just too on-the-nose.

The tabs at 20:31 are just a masterpiece of blink-and-you'll-miss-it humor. Well done, Dan.

Your lobsters create within me a rich tapestry of emotion.

I know it's such a quick and minor joke, but IKillWeedNames is such a great stream/account name

This made me glad that the only virtual concerts I heard about happened in less restrict platforms like anamanaguchi's concert in Minecraft (you only need to buy the base game but then free range) or the creepypastas narrators in VRchat (that as far as I know is free and you don't even need a VR set).

It is technically called "Coercive Monetization" and is the most common sinister strategy for F2P game-as-service companies. Even connected with tournaments which involve games designed around lots of randomness factors to increase stickiness of average players to basically give them hope that they could earn real-money from it. They call it "e-sports". I prefer to call it "disguised gambling".

“...Gachapon toys...” “...Gachapon...” “...Gacha...” //has flashback to that video of a guy spending 1000usd on Apple gift cards for Love Live! SIF and not getting his best girl after so many rolls//

Rewatching this after the NFT's video. That last part was ominous, to say the least.

It's incredible how an unfinished game became this mess of a global phenomenon with a legacy that will likely be brimmed with nostalgia in ten years time, and those future post-Gen Z kids won't realize they were manipulated into loving a product that set a precedent for their future games.

I won't say Fortnite is the reason I quit teaching high schoolers, but it definitely made my life harder.

literally the only fortnite video i have ever watched also 10 minute concert from the way my friends made it sound like it was longer then that

About the point made at 14:00... The free pass is actually structured so that you reach the end of the free items at the exact same time as the paid players reach the end of the paid pass. It’s exact, and definitely not a coincidence. I didn’t buy the battle pass for quite some time, so I witnessed this first hand for about 3-4 seasons because my best friends owned the pass. This happens because the paid pass has tiers that earn “bonus XP percentages,” while the free does not. There are also paid challenges with XP bonuses, and if you bought the last season, a good boost to the pass at the beginning. So, the paid users accelerate faster. Definitely manufactured discontent. More people should pay attention to this stuff.

I watched this video three times already, I'm using it as a reference in my Master's degree final thesis on video game culture, and I'm absolutely fascinated and appalled at the design choices embedded in Fortnite. Would I be the only one to love more content like this?