Pop Culture Crossovers Are Everywhere, But They're Costing Us The Weirder Games We Deserve

Jumping into a Fortnite match is always a surreal experience, because any round of the battle royale juggernaut might include Lando Calrissian, Spider-Man, Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock from the movie Venom, RoboCop, Ellen Ripley from the 1979 horror film Alien, the Joker, wrestler John Cena, and pop star Lady Gaga. And those are just the skins my friends and I use.

In this way, Fortnite is as close to the online world imagined in Ready Player One as we have in real life. There's definitely something hilarious in watching Deadpool, Alien's Xenomorph, Geralt from The Witcher games, and Will Smith as Mike Lowrey from Bad Boys dance to NSYNC together. There's goofy, childish fun in random characters being mixed up and doing stupid things like forming a rock band or riding a cartoon train in between bouts of gunning each other down. It might be an incredibly one-note joke, but it's one that doesn't seem to get old.

But playing Fortnite always feels kind of gross for the same reason. It's a mosh pit of business interests--not a celebration of characters and stories so much as the gotta-catch-em-all collecting of Intellectual Property. As corporations come to own more and more media of all sorts, we see more and more of that Ready Player One blender of nonsensical appearances of various bits of pop culture, devoid of any real soul. Fortnite is a major offender but far from the only one. You can be Nikki Minaj and shoot Paul Atreides from Dune in Call of Duty. You can beat on Bugs Bunny as Batman in MultiVersus. You can ride a Ghostbusters-inspired speeder bike in Destiny 2.