Video Games Invade Reality as ‘Fortnite’ Creates a Narratively-Driven Shared Moment

Lama pinatas are appearing across Europe. The Durr Burger showed up in a California desert. Epic’s “Fortnite” is bleeding into the real world, and the mystery of their dimensional warp has players scrambling both online and in that dusty thing we call the real world to figure just what’s happening next.Car-sized burger restaurant mascots and piñatas aside, it was on June 30 that “Fortnite” actually broke a barrier. The megapopular battle royale game did a remarkable thing. Without changing the rules of its world, they got players to stand still and stare up into the sky together, and watch an event that would happen just once. The game stopped, a story began, and “Fortnite” is likely to be caught in the momentum of this narrative breakthrough for more than the foreseeable future.