The One Weird Trick That Transforms Fortnite

I’m 35 years old, and I play Fortnite.

That’s not really that weird–lots of adults are Fortnite fans. But for those of us of a certain age, Fortnite is just a game we play sometimes, whereas for younger players, it’s part of their social fabric. It’s where they live. We’re just visiting. Or maybe encroaching? One particularly rowdy 8-year-old I met in the game not too long ago screamed that I’m way too old to be hanging out in Fortnite. Was he wrong?

No, of course not. But given the perception of Fortnite as the domain of the children, it’s only natural that we adults are scared to go beyond the battle royale surface. And that, in turn, means that those of us who do want to dive in are going to have a hard time getting started because our friends don’t understand it and can’t explain any of it.

But I’ve put in the work. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Fortnite wilds, dancing with and observing the stoners and children in the game’s strange social underbelly. It’s actually not that scary as long as you know a couple of dos and don’ts.

First, don’t voice chat with people you don’t know. This is actually pretty easy, because unless you’re LFGing in battle royale, there isn’t going to be any kind of pressing need for it. And in Party Royale and Creative modes, it’s rare for anyone to be on the open game voice chat. So that’s good news if you’re the sort of person who didn’t want to explore Fortnite because you saw Dunkey’s Fortnite Daycare video and really would rather not speak to children. And hey, there’s even a non-voice version of the Among Us mode.

This brings us to something you should do: learn the basics of non-verbal Fortnite communication.

The pillar of communication in Fortnite is a move that a lot of folks will recognize from other online games–crouching over and over again as a general signal of friendliness. Fortnite players use it that way, too, but there’s Fortnite-specific nuance to it.

This move, which I think of as a “crouch-nod,” kind of has an “aloha” quality to it–it works as hello and goodbye, please and thank you, an apology, or just a general acknowledgment. A polite sort of “I see you, I’m aware of you, I’m trying to not be a jerk.” Fortnite players use it so often it’s essentially in-game etiquette.

If you’re in a more normal social situation, in the Party Royale social hub or some Creative world, the crouch-nod is etiquette, and this is where the contextual nuance comes into play. In a more low-intensity setting, quickly crouching over and over again sometimes comes off as comical, inspiring the folks who see you to crouch repeatedly and spin in circles at you in some kind of stupid but often hilarious ritual. Other times, it plays like Lassie trying to tell everybody that Timmy got stuck in the well again–or, in other words, that you want others to follow you so you can show them something.

Here’s a fairly common scenario. You’re in the Party Royale social hub, making your Obi-Wan dance to Dua Lipa’s “Don’t Start Now.” A Darth Vader walks up, starts doing the same emote for about half a second before cutting it off and doing a single quick crouch. That means, essentially, “Hey, I’d like to dance with you, let’s sync up our emotes.”

So your Obi-Wan cuts off the emote and crouches back. It takes a couple tries to get your emotes going in sync, but now you get that Kinect Star Wars vibe you’ve been searching for. But you don’t want to stand there forever. When it’s time to move on, you cut off your emote with the pull of a trigger, and then you give a single polite, apologetic crouch-nod at Darth Vader and Gangnam Style away. There, the meaning is basically, “I want to do something else now but it’s not because I hate you.”

These examples more or less sum up the sentiment of the crouch-nod move, and that’s what you really need to understand. You’ll have to figure out specific situational meanings on your own for the most part. But that’s the easy part, because just knowing was half the battle.

While the crouch-nod will be enough to get you through most interactions, there’s a more advanced layer of this language that involves emotes–though this layer is not necessarily one that you should use in most situations. I’m talking about what I think of as “horny” emotes.

There are three main ones that fit this bill: Ride the Pony, Eagle, and Bring It Around. There are other, less commonly used ones as well–any emote that begins with your character reaching their hand outward in a way that could look like a grope if another person is close, for example. But it’s mostly those three.

Like the crouch-nod, these emotes have some contextual nuance, and they don’t necessarily mean anything weird or negative. But if you’re wearing a lady skin and somebody walks up behind you and does any of those three emotes, then you’re probably being sexually harassed.

In the greater sense, those emotes aren’t just used as a literal declaration of horniness–there are ironic meme usages too, like a sort of jokey way of saying you think somebody’s wearing something cool. Most folks will just use a heart or fire emoji for that, since those are less ambiguous. But others just can’t seem to stop themselves from trying to be “hilarious”–your mileage may vary.

Beyond that, people don’t usually try to communicate anything complicated with emotes. Usually, a dance is just a dance. A heart emoji is a positive expression. There’s nothing to decode. It’s just folks being silly, and in Fortnite people are almost always down for silliness.

Last season, I was in a solo match, stalking somebody at the truck stop north of Rocky Reels, when the storm circle came up on us quickly. So my target jumped in a big rig and started to drive off, and I just hopped in the passenger seat and rode along with them. And this wasn’t the early game here–there were only nine players remaining when we began this little trip.

We rode in peace until we got to Coney Crossroads, where we ran into another player. This one also tried to get in the big rig, but couldn’t, since it only has two seats. So after some brief confusion, this third player climbed on top of the cabin and we continued on with our joy ride.

Sadly, the next person we encountered opened fire and killed our outside passenger, so I got out and killed this new person, and then our driver killed me, and then two other players hiding nearby sniped the driver. Step aside, Bilbo Baggins–this was the real unexpected journey.

Another time, I was hanging out in a user-made team deathmatch mode called Summer vs. Winter, in which two teams start at each end of an arena and try to push the other back to their home base. My team had dominated, and we had the opposing team completely locked down in their end, unable to do much of anything. And that’s boring, so I took advantage of the fact that this mode gives every player an infinite stack of Chug Splash healing items, and started throwing them into the other team’s spawn area while frantically crouch-nodding.

This move very quickly turned the whole match into an uneasy emote sesh, with folks occasionally shooting each other, but mostly just fooling around. I had fun with those folks for about 20 minutes before we all started trickling out. It was delightful.

Fortnite language is probably at least a little more sophisticated than I’m giving it credit for–I’m still an old guy who doesn’t have any children to guide me through this mess. Or maybe not. The crouch-nod and Fortnite-specific contextual stuff are things that most folks have to glean from playing, because every “word” of this language means 10 different things and you have to use context to know which definition is the right one.

In some ways, this level of non-verbal communication is ideal–I don’t have to know anything about anybody else’s politics or beliefs that I might hate, and it’s incredibly easy to permanently avoid anybody who annoys you because you can just block them.

But maybe most importantly, it’s just too adorable to see all these cartoon characters communicate with primitive gestures like cave people. I don’t need to ruin that by meeting the real people controlling them.