What Does “Played Themselves” Mean in Fortnite? Explained

Gaming discourse is something we love and hate at the same time. Phrases like “noob,” “pleb,” and “bozo” are ones that came from the gaming communities and are an essential part of the gaming lingo. When someone is “throwing” or “choking” during games, the player loses the lead they earned during the game and eventually lost it. Fortnite is not a stranger to that as well, and the phrase “{*insert player’s username*} played themselves” started showing up in the bottom left corner of our screens. In this article, we will try to explain this phrase more thoroughly. Let’s see what “played themselves” means in Fortnite.

The phrase “played themselves” means that a player trying to outsmart the game mechanics or opposing players has fallen to its demise. They probably blew themselves up, tried to manipulate game mechanics for their gain and failed, or just tried to “cheese” to the victory. 

We will explain this phrase further and mention a few other funny phrases that appear in Fortnite after an event or incident during games. If you are interested in Fortnite lingo, stay with us until the end of the article.

What Is Gaming Dictionary or Language?

Since its “birth,” video games have brought us many innovations in popular culture – the characterization, narration of the game’s story, storytelling managed by the player’s choices, and, most importantly, gaming language for this article. We always knew of phrases popularized by television, silver screens, or books, but games went a level higher.

The language got so popular that even the game developers started being self-aware, and they decided to award their fans with references that only true gamers would know. At first, the outsiders viewed the phrases with prejudice, and those individuals were called nerds and weird. The joke is on them since the movies, and tv shows started implementing their fan’s phrases and “language” into their projects, which makes the gaming community vindicated in some way.

Gaming lingo is different in each game, so “freezing,” “kiting,” and “jungling” is associated with League of Legends game. At the same time, “camping,” “cheesing,” and “hacking” is connected to first-person shooter games, like Call of Duty and Battlefield. Of course, words or phrases are shared among the different games, but essentially, each game has its own phrases.

With global communication, openness, and accessibility of video games in recent years, most of the people who get into playing video games need to know some of the gaming phrases. Fortnite is a great example of that, and we will provide you with other cool phrases that are essential for every future Fortnite player:

• Blanks – as the word suggests, the bullets you hit the enemy with did not register any damage, which points to server issues.
• Bandies – a term for bandages that heals up to 75 HP
• Bots – this isn’t exclusive to only Fortnite, but when you are playing so bad that players call you an AI? Well, that’s unfortunate.
• 90s – this term is not referencing the 90s reference from popular culture, but a building method where a player builds two walls and a ramp in succession until the fatigue kicks in.
• Deagle – a slang for Desert Eagle Hand Cannon, which name is shared around all games.
• Dub – a term short of the letter “W,” which is short of the word “win”.
• Harry Pottered: Fortnite is big on building in-game, but when you overdo it and get stuck under the stairs, like “The Boy Who Lived,” well, good luck with that.

We can mention many more phrases, but we will leave them for the next article. All in all, gaming lingo is exclusive to each game, and its phrases are slowly “infiltrating” the common dictionary.

What Does “Played Themselves” Mean in Fortnite?

After we explained gaming lingo in video games and mentioned a few exclusive for Fortnite, let’s talk about the phrase from the start of the article. Fortnite is quite a funny game since it does and doesn’t take itself seriously. The game became quite popular among younger gamers (tweens) and was frowned upon many times.

However, Fortnite stuck with its own thing, and once reluctant, players started playing the game and enjoying it. Phrases like “…played themselves” are part of that, and whenever you are parachuting down to a certain location, there is at least one alert like this popping out at the bottom left of your screen. So, what does it mean?

The phrase “played themselves” appears when a player dies in-game for its own “stupidity.” Imagine this – there is an opposing player that you can assassinate, but greed overcomes your common sense. You decide to throw a grenade to kill potentially two players, even if it does not makes sense in this situation. Of course, you hit the terrain, your building, or whatever, and you blow yourself up. The game will display your username to all the players on the server and say, “username123 played themselves.”.

Other situations include not opening the parachute in time and falling to your death, “abusing” certain game mechanics and falling to your death, and more.

You are trying to outsmart everyone without any foundation – get rolled. Another one is quite funny as well – if you decide to cheat, a game will ban you from the server, and the alert will be something like this: “username123 was struck by the banhammer.”.

There are other few, but we will mention them in other articles. Until then, whenever you get an alert that someone “played themselves,” know they tried something to outsmart others and failed miserably.