Partly, though, I wanted to take phone pictures of Tokyo-To as a tourist would.
I ended up taking screenshots of the actual screen.
Okay: so while I was doing this, it felt super stupid.
If I already sound like an idiot here - and I’m pretty sure I do m8s!
- I definitely felt like one.
It was not at all like being a tourist in a city.
Here’s the thing.
It sort of worked.
It just didn’t work at that moment.
What it meant to me.
Now: I want to clarify, slightly awkwardly, what I’m trying to do here.
I don’t for a minute think that Sega is just going to dump Jet Set into theFortnitestructure.
Not the hundred-player jazz, just the geography.
I wondered how Tokyo-To would work as a Fortnite island.
Fortnite is an open-world, a single island.
Tokyo-to is a single city.
Plenty of open-world games have taken on single cities and done it well.
Spider-Man in New York,GTA 5in Los Angeles - sorry, San Andreas.
I play these games and think: how expansive, how finely realised.
What a great sense of place.
I play Fortnite all the time.
You’re always reveling in the place, but you’re always moving too.
In an average match I might cover half the island.
I inevitably see it as a place that is very much joined together.
I know how to get from one mountain, say, to a nearby town.
And when I’m in the town I can look over and see the mountain.
But now: here is how I remember Seattle, a favourite city from the real world.
Whenever I think of Seattle, I picture it in moments.
My memory of it is moments.
But I never did and I never would.
They have their own times of day, their own moods.
They have times of day that never change.
When you are at the Skyscraper District, it is always night.
It always feels like 11am on a Monday morning at the bus terminal.
You could not zip in a helicopter from the bus terminal to the skyscrapers.
You would need to hop between maps, and there would be breaks and loading.
Weirdly, I appreciate there are not breaks and loading in a real place.
But they don’t feel like that.
Because consciousness - mine at least - provides the breaks.
You go into autopilot.
The neighborhoods change suddenly because I was talking, or wasn’t paying attention.
This is what I learned trying to picture a Jet Set Radio Fortnite.
Fortnite is great, but it feels more like a toytown laid out on a duvet.
Because you’re free to see the whole thing from above as you arrive.
And you’re able to cover huge toytown distances in a few seconds.
Weirdly, I even feel this about GTA sometimes.
A world without cognitive dividers.
A world that would not work so well, I think, broken down into blurry cameraphone snapshots.
