Fortnite has banned ‘gooning’ with emote update to keep things SFW

The latest Fortnite update seems to have been used to prevent players from performing sexual acts in-game.

Aside from the copious amount of crossover characters from DC Comics, Star Wars, and even Power Rangers, one of the other most famous aspects of Fortnite is the various dance moves it contains.

Several dances have been added as emotes over the years, allowing you to floss in celebration of a battle royale victory or virtually party with friends during in-game concerts.

However, while innocent enough in a vacuum, many a cheeky player has figured out ways to make these dances resemble sexual acts, which seems to be why Epic Games recently patched Fortnite to disable emotes under certain conditions.

For context, some Fortnite players would perform certain dances in close proximity to each other, which can make it look like one of them is humping the other, amongst other things (this X post has some particularly crude examples).

It’s all just players being immature, no different to how Halo players would teabag one another in multiplayer matches back in the day. If you don’t know, teabagging involves players crouching up and down on dead players’ faces.

At some point, though, Epic Games made it so emotes cannot be performed when in close proximity to a player using the Party Hips or Poki emotes, which involve quite a bit of gyrating.

Epic Games hasn’t put out an official statement on the matter, but players have found out thanks to a video on Reddit demonstrating the change and an X post by Fort Byte News, which declares ‘Gooning has been vaulted.’

As a reminder, gooning is essentially a descriptor for when someone is being openly horny or perverted.

It may seem random but, as Fort Byte News and others speculate, this is likely an effort by Epic to clamp down on NSFW behaviour and keep Fortnite as child friendly as it can be.

Fortnite is extremely popular with young audiences and Epic could be trying to head off any potential controversies or complaints from upset parents.

After all, Roblox, another platform popular with kids, has faced criticisms for being unsafe and allowing inappropriate content to be made accessible to children.

More recently, a lawsuit was filed against it for allegedly facilitating ‘the distribution of child sexual abuse material and the sexual exploitation’ of children, with a petition demanding that Roblox’s CEO resign.

Combined with recent changes here in the UK regarding online age verification, perhaps Epic wants to ensure Fortnite’s image is as squeaky clean as possible, so it won’t need to enforce similar changes and potentially bar non-adults from playing the game.

It’s also probably not a good look for the game when several of the playable characters include real life celebrities, who likely wouldn’t appreciate seeing themselves be involved in unintentionally inappropriate acts.

This isn’t even the first time Fortnite has had to make changes to how emotes work. For instance, it has completely banned them within its in-game Martin Luther King Jr. and Holocaust museums, which are indeed real things you can visit in the funny battle royale game where Batman and Darth Vader can get into a shooting match with one another.

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