March Through Time: Fortnite’s Passive Engagement with the Photographic Archive of Civil Rights
In August of this year, Epic Games collaborated with TIME Studios to host a special, virtual event dedicated to the 58th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Fortnite’s March Through Time, an interactive experience inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s 17-minute “I Have a Dream” speech, is accessible through the free-to-play game’s creative mode. Creative mode stands apart from Fortnite’s most popular battle royale mode in that players can freely create their own content, design mini-games, and set the rules on their own islands. In a virtual re-creation of the National Mall built by Fortnite players ChaseJackman, GQuanoe, XWDFr, and YU7A, players are prompted to cooperate in collaborative mini-games, work together to answer questions, figure out puzzles, and interact with “museum-inspired points of interest” to complete the event’s central quest. According to the project’s executive Tomi Omololu-Lange and Matthew O’Rourke, the purpose of March Through Time is educational, meant to “teach kids about a vital era in American history via a platform they find familiar and engaging.”[1]Given Fortnite’s accessibility, cultural ubiquity, and popularity amongst young people, the game is a reasonable platform for attempting to reach young people “where they’re at.”
However, Fortnite’s March Through Time quickly became infamous not for its purported educational value, but instead for its “cringiness.”[2] If you spent as much time as I did on the internet this summer, you may have encountered viral Tik Toks or Tweets capturing the event. You might have seen avatars resembling the likes of Rick Sanchez, Clark Kent, and Ariana Grande running around with picket signs. Perhaps you saw clips of these characters kneeling in reverence to Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln. You might have even laughed at screenshots of players discovering 3D models of segregated “white” and “colored” water fountains. Instead of players participating in March Through Time as a way to learn about the civil rights movement or to honor King, it became a way to participate in the absurdity created by what Twitter user Blessing Adeoye Jr. calls the project’s complete and total “tonal dissonance.”[3]
Having taken up playing Fortnite semi-regularly during COVID as a free and easy way to have fun with long-distance friends, I wanted to experience what I was seeing online first-hand. I was able to convince my close friend, Andrea, to explore March Through Time together and we found ourselves utterly baffled by the whole experience. Unsettled by our nervous laughter, we immediately took note of the project’s competing tones. We found that Fortnite’s cartoon style clashed with the setting of the National Mall as Adeoye Jr. describes. Moreover, we were somewhat perturbed by the knowledge that we, just over a year ago, had actively participated in the real-life Black Lives Matter protests that erupted following the murder of George Floyd. This was a time in our lives that was fresh on our mind during our second COVID summer. Even if the purpose of the March Through Time was the furthest thing from a protest, something about having the option to virtually emote with protest signs which said nothing more than “DREAM” felt wrong. We felt as if the history of Black struggles for liberation were entirely reduced to a multiculturalist, post-racial rhetoric of “teamwork.”
For this reason, we mulled over the project’s educational value. Looking beyond the tonal dissonance that dominated the surface, what was the March Through Time intending to teach its players about the civil rights movement? In what ways was the project aiming to honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy? Or, as Leigh Raiford acknowledges of the present uses of civil rights images in her book Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: “We are invited, expected, even demanded to recount and memorialize. To remember. But what exactly are we being asked to remember? How are we being asked to remember? And to what end?”[4]
For me, the failure of March Through Time arises not just from the project’s tonal dissonance, but more importantly from the way in which it firmly relegates the events of the civil rights movement to the past, refusing to acknowledge how the struggles which birthed the movement persist in the present. This becomes most evident to me in how the archive of civil rights photography is used within the project’s virtual landscape. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to claim that it fails to put the archive of civil rights photography to active use.
At the heart of March Through Time—located at the very center of the game’s re-creation of the National Mall—is a virtual museum space through which players can move freely, stopping to view what the exhibit claims are “pivotal images in the civil rights movement.” The exhibit consists entirely of black and white photographs, static and unmoving, displayed cleanly, grouped together on the museum’s walls in thin black frames. These images are large and illuminated, standing out as points of interest in the low-lit museum space. However, players are unable to truly interact with or even zoom into the photos. Players are simply invited to stand before them at a distance and, perhaps, with a kind of reverence as the audio of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” acts as a soundtrack for the viewing. It must be noted that the images players are prompted to revere are given very little context. The only clues to their significance are provided by vague captions, such as “SEPARATE BUT UNEQUAL,” “BIRMINGHAM CAMPAIGN,” and “LUNCH COUNTER SIT-INS.” Consequently, the photographs are presumed to speak for themselves; they are emblematic of an already established, concluded history upon which players can only look “back.”
While a few figures in the photographs are recognizable, such as Rosa Parks’s mug shot in the collection of photos captioned “THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT,” or a young Ruby Bridges in the photos captioned “THE DESEGREGATION OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS,” there are no names attributed to the faces in the photos. In fact, barely any faces can be made out at all because players are only able to stand at a distance from them. As a result, these images are relegated to a distant past in a manner that is incompatible with the player’s present. It is this distance from the images that troubles me more than the project’s competing tones. If the images are distant, then so too are the struggles of civil rights, which is proved untrue again and again by the persistence of voter suppression, state violence, mass incarceration, and all other systems which continue to uphold our country’s climate of anti-blackness. It is this ongoing history of struggles for Black liberation which Fortnite’s exhibit fails to acknowledge in their passive arrangement of civil rights photography.
Photography was of vital importance during the civil rights era and continues to be a key element of Black social movement in the U.S. In his 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King himself claims that the way the media captured the state’s brutal response to the Birmingham Campaign exposed the “truth” of Black people’s subordination. King writes that:
The brutality with which officials would have quelled the Black individual became impotent when it could not be pursued with stealth and remain unobserved. It was caught—as a fugitive from a penitentiary is often caught—in gigantic circling spotlights. It was imprisoned in a luminous glare revealing the naked truth to the whole world.[5]
Yet, scholar Martin Burger’s central contention is that the images of the movement that circulated in the media in the 1960s— such as those showing Black people getting beaten by police batons, hosed down, and attacked by police K9s— did not necessarily reveal “truth” to the public. Instead, these selected images portrayed Black people not as active fighters for their rights and liberties, but as passive victims to individual white violence. Examining the dominant newspapers and magazine publications in the 1960s such as The New York Times, Life Magazine, and even TIME, Berger finds that the way these images were cropped, arranged, and narrativized with captions participated in stripping Black photographic subjects of their agency. As a result, white people and the state could then be positioned as “benevolent bestowers” of civil rights, diminishing the severity of the state’s ongoing violence against Black people, and extremely limiting the demands Black activists could make in favor of their liberation.[6]
Similarly, the passive affect of Fortnite’s March Through Time is a product of the exhibit’s curation. The exhibit’s arrangements – its choice to hold the photos at a distance, to use minimal captions, and to not give faces to names – reduces the photographs to “digital shadows of their former being, both materially and intellectually.” The exhibit fails to recognize the archive of civil rights photography as one that is “actively resourceful” as scholar Elizabeth Edwards might observe.[7] These arrangements raise no new and interesting questions about our engagement with civil rights. Unfortunately, the way Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is employed as a soundtrack to this viewing simply reinforces its passivity; it assumes the dream has already been achieved. This is why Fortnite can so easily, without contention or contestation, distill the lessons of the civil rights movement into seven words: “We move forward when we work together.”[8]
Does this then imply that digital games are themselves incapable of an active engagement with the civil rights archive? Is recognizing the “active potential” of civil rights imagery something impossible to do in the mainstream? I have to wonder if there are ways to engage the archive of civil rights in a digital game format in a manner that refuses to delimit the archive’s possibilities. There’s an irony in Fortnite’s passive engagement with these photographs given the active ontology of digital games— what Alexander Galloway claims to be an action-based medium.[9] This is why I think there is still tremendous potential for games to reorient our understanding of this history. While I am unsure about what an active engagement with the Black archive of photography might look like inside digital games at the moment, at least I can be sure that it’s not going to happen inside Fortnite any time soon.
In my next blog post, I’d like to examine what I understand to be two active engagements with the archive of civil rights photography. These are visual and sonic engagements that ask questions, don’t assume knowledge, and seek to uncover the ways in which our understanding of the civil rights movement is already mediated. Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (2016)and Arthur Jafa’s Dreams are Colder than Death (2013) are both films that are invested in the “active potential” of civil rights imagery. The way they position the civil rights archive with and against contemporary images imbues them with an urgency that is entirely lost inside Fortnite’s tribute to the March on Washington. These films don’t simply memorialize civil rights images, but make them usefulfor exploring pressing questions that concern us in the present day.
[1] https://time.com/6092587/i-have-dream-speech-fortnite/
[2] https://www.denofgeek.com/games/fortnite-martin-luther-king-jr-event-reactions-controversy-debate/
[3] https://twitter.com/BlessingJr/status/1431004344988565506?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1431004344988565506%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.denofgeek.com%2Fgames%2Ffortnite-martin-luther-king-jr-event-reactions-controversy-debate%2F
[4] Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), pp. 3-4.
[5] Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can’t Wait, (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p.30.
[6] Martin A. Berger, Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), pp.6-7.
[7] Elizabeth Edwards. “Photographs: Material Form and the Dynamic Archive.” p.53.
[8] https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/celebrate-mlk-time-studios-presents-march-through-time-in-fortnite
[9] Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p.3.