Chapter 2: Fortnite’s March Through Time Experience

One of the frontrunners of metaverse world building is Epic Games, a company founded in 1991 by CEO Tim Sweeney. Epic Games is a leader in 3D game development and develops Unreal Engine, which “powers the world’s leading games and is also adopted across industries such as film and television, architecture, automotive, manufacturing, and simulation” (Learn About Epic Games, n.d.). Unreal Engine is free to download with every feature unlocked and included. It operates under a standard End User License Agreement (EULA); anyone can create projects that generate revenue using Unreal Engine, including museums, as long as the revenue generated is less than $1 million USD. Epic Games also has a robust program to help educators teach their students to use Unreal Engine and create interactive 3D environments, games, and experiences. You can learn more about Unreal Engine (most recently Unreal Engine 5) here.

In August 2021, Epic Games’s Fortnite launched a new island in Fortnite Creative mode in partnership with TIME Studios, called March Through Time (hereafter MTT).

“March Through Time teleports players to D.C. 63, a reimagined Washington, DC. Built by GQuanoe, XWDFr, and YU7A, travel to the Lincoln Memorial and United States National Mall, where Dr. King gave his iconic 17-minute speech for Civil Rights. The experience extends with museum-inspired points of interest, and collaborative mini-game quests you complete with others. These activities progress players through the experience and bring to life important themes of Dr. King’s speech: we move forward when we work together” (TIME Studios Presents’ The March Through Time in Fortnite Creative, 2021).

The project’s executive producers, Tomi Omololu-Lange and Matthew O’Rourke, hoped to “reach kids where they were and create inspirational content as interactive and engaging as what they have become accustomed to. With Fortnite’s unprecedented scale and unparalleled immersive capabilities, we knew their platform would allow for the most significant impact” (qtd. in TIME Staff, 2021). March Through Time in Fortnite is the spin-off of an Augmented-Reality exhibit by TIME Studios at the DuSable Museum called The March.

Gamespot, a video game news website, published the video below showing full gameplay of the full March Through Time experience on their YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q13S2lmXoM

You can also view one of the gameplay experiences I had in February 2022 with the video above. I have not given any money to Fortnite to unlock any special “skins”, so the avatar that I’m using is randomized and default. Players in Fortnite cannot customize their avatars without spending real-world money.

The large cubelike building in the middle of the reflecting pool serves as a more traditional museum element to this virtual experience. While the museum doesn’t have any interpretive text for players to read, the walls feature large real-life photographs of important moments and people during the Civil Rights Movement. On one wall, a title reads “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” and shows five photographs of Dr. King speaking and marching. Another wall features Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Players can see her arrest photo, a photo of her being finger-printed by police, and the bus where she refused to give up her seat.

Using real photographs of historical events and people helps keep MTT from being a farce, especially since the overall platform of Fortnite being used for history and education hasn’t really been done before. The creators of MTT did not choose to create an animated version of Dr. King in Fortnite’s cartoonish style. Instead of showing a computer-modeled Dr. King standing at the podium in front of the Lincoln Memorial statue, there is an empty podium that players can approach. The huge screens on the “museum” in the reflecting pool clearly show the black and white recording of Dr. King giving his speech in 1963.

(Use the arrows on either side of the image to navigate through images below).

With the avatars experiencing real photographs in March Through Time, does this parallel how people interact with “the real thing” in museums? Is “the real thing” always important for visitors to have meaningful museum experiences? Researcher and professor K.F. Latham’s 2015 study and subsequent report on these questions explore some interesting takeaways. Latham breaks down a visitor’s experience with “the real thing” in museums into four main themes: presence, self, relation, and surround. The third theme, “relation,” deals with museum objects and empathy: “[the theme] is about connecting to other beings (living things), events, the past, and ways of life. . . these conceptions are. . . about understanding what it means to live in a time or be at an event in history.” (Latham, 2015, p.8).

Latham’s study reveals that visitors often associate objects with the original users of the object, the makers of the object, or with those who set it up. Understanding can be about a specific person, a situation, or a time. “E.g., how did it feel to be Rosa Parks, sitting on that bus that day? . . .How did it feel to be in that electric chair just before they pushed the button? . . . What did that dinosaur see in his world, through his eyes” (ibid). Or, in the case of Fortnite’s March Through Time (MTT) experience, ‘What did it feel like to be standing on the National Mall when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his most famous speech to thousands of people?’

While March Through Time attempts to give players an understanding of the original event, in this respect the experience falls short. Especially almost a year after its launch, visitors to MTT are few and far between. It’s common now to be the only player on the island, which makes it impossible to participate in and win most of the mini-games to complete the challenge. The National Mall is empty save for a handful of players at any given time. Where are the thousands of everyday people cheering en masse around the reflecting pool? How difficult was it for someone standing at the far end of the pool to hear the speech, even over loudspeakers? Since MTT has giant ‘plasma screens’ showing Dr. King in close-up, and since his voice is part of the diegesis of the game, it’s difficult to get an accurate idea of what it was like to really “be there.”

The metaverse and virtual museums, of course, cannot give visitors the real thing. Visitors can see photos of the real thing, or even detailed 3D models of the real thing, but never the real thing itself. Does this make virtual museum experiences, or museum exhibits in the metaverse any less effective or meaningful? More research will need to be conducted as the technologies develop.

The museum in the center of the reflecting pool serves as a source of learning for players to then put to the test in a trivia challenge in another building. This building represents a large library or archive and is also representative of TIME Magazine and their involvement with the project. Throughout the building, players use buttons to answer several trivia questions about the Civil Rights Movement. After correctly answering the trivia questions in the TIME building, the player is instantly transported to the front steps of a multi-story high school.

A large sign outside of the school reads “In 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges became the first elementary-grade student to integrate a school in the South. Ruby and her mother were escorted to school every day for a year by four U.S. Federal Marshals to protect their safety.” It is unclear why the developers labeled the building “High School” when the historic moment referred to in the sign was at William Frantz Elementary School. It’s possible that this is because there are a limited number of assets and props available to use in Fortnite Creative. Players cannot enter the high school to explore the building, and instead a blue, glowing flower-like shape floating at the entrance serves as a portal for the avatars to travel back to the National Mall.

The rest of the mini-games have similar teleportation effects; one game transports the player to a wall with segregated drinking fountains, while another transports the player outside of a diner with information about lunch-counter sit-in protests in 1960 Greensboro. Although players cannot interact with these short scenes, they act as informative rewards for those who are able to complete the mini-game challenges.

One of the participants in K.F. Latham’s study on “the real thing” in museums reported that the realness of an exhibit also has to do with the environment and setting the scene. In her interview, the participant shares her thoughts on displaying architectural elements, such as an old church door, out of context:

“Being able to say ‘Imagine the church that goes with this door,’ is pretty cool. It would be cooler to be able to see the church. When you’re in the dinosaur room, you can see the trees. You can see the blades of grass. You can see the footprints. You can see the water in the reeds. You can see what they’re eating” (qtd. in Latham, 2015, p.15).

An advantage to creating a museum exhibit or experience in the metaverse is being able to create immersive environments that set the scene. Metaverse museum visitors can explore these environments together and can participate in revealing them. Without players to complete the mini-game challenges, the informational sub-scenes like the diner, public school, and drinking fountains are inaccessible.

Limitations for Solo Players

The gamified element of March Through Time is that players are invited to work together to complete mini-game challenges with other players. The theme of the mini-games is togetherness and collaboration. Most of the mini-games require more than one player to achieve, and the challenges reward players by teleporting them to small scenes with an interpretive panel about an aspect of the Civil Rights Movement. Once a mini-game challenge is successfully completed, players receive a “light” and can “add their light” to a monument with an open book in a display case at the opposite end of the reflecting pool. A sign near the monument invites players to “Tweet at #FNDC63 with a screenshot of your light on the board and [share] how [their] voice can make a positive impact.”

Maybe it is due to internal limitations with Fortnite Creative, but most challenges in themselves offer no meaningful tie-ins to the main subject of the exhibit experience, Civil Rights and social/racial justice, unless players can successfully complete them with other players. Since there was no one else playing on the island when I logged in (except for one other player who left within the first five minutes), the only game I was able to complete on my own was the trivia game mentioned above. Exploring the #FNDC63 hashtag on Twitter informed me that the other mini-games also had places to teleport, such as an exhibit on segregated drinking fountains, or a burning bus to represent the violence that Freedom Riders experienced.

Meaningful gamification helps “the player to continue on their exploration of the desired context. . . Instead of considering gamification as a panacea for motivation, . . . people’s autonomy should be respected in any attempt to engage them and influence their behavior” (Leftheriotis et al., 2017, p. 8). Education and learning should not be dependent on the visitor’s ability or inability to attend an exhibit with other people. Most of the important learning opportunities of March Through Time require visitors to work with other people, which is nearly impossible unless you are a player with multiple friends who also play Fortnite and can log in with you at the same time.

My experience as a solo-visitor was an empty island, a museum with photographs but no interpretation, and a lot of mini-games that I could look at but could not play. Clearly MTT was designed for larger groups of people to experience together, but now that the initial excitement of the launch of the experience (and subsequent spike in attention to the game mode for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in February 2022) has passed, allowances could be made by Epic Games for solo players to better participate. It will be interesting to see if Epic Games makes any changes to or expands the experience for the upcoming 60^th anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28^th, 2023.

It should also be said that some players did find the mini-games impactful, including parents: