What is game sense?
Game sense is your ability to take in and process all the information you have to make the best decision.
You can think of your game sense as your game IQ.
Having good game sense enables you to beat players that are more mechanically skilled than you because you can outsmart and outplay them.
For example, Wayne Gretzky is considered the greatest hockey player ever and even has the nickname “The Great One”. But in his own words, he wasn’t the most talented, fastest, or strongest player.
So what made Wayne Gretzky so great?
He knew where he had to be positioned. He would “skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been”. In other words, Wayne Gretzky had great game sense for hockey.
You can think of game sense as the opposite of your mechanical skills. Where your mechanical skills are the things you do in Fortnite, for example, building, editing, and aiming.
Or, like the concept of Ying and Yang, they are complementary to one another. And you need both good game sense and good mechanics to be a great Fortnite player.
As you know, it’s fairly straightforward to improve your mechanical skills.
To improve your building mechanics you can jump into a Creative map and start cranking out builds, high-ground retakes, edits, and so on. And to improve your aiming mechanics you can grind aim trainers like Kovaak’s or aim maps in Fortnite Creative.
But improving your game sense isn’t so simple.
In fact, game sense may be one of the most difficult things to learn and develop in all of Fortnite.
I’m here to help you.
In this post, you’re going to find actionable tips to help you improve your game sense in Fortnite so you can become a better player and win more games.
Game sense tip #1: Watch the best Fortnite players
If you wanted to get better at hockey, do you think it would be a good idea to watch Wayne Gretzky play and practice?
You bet it would.
Imagine you could watch as he practices, listen to his thought process, and analyze his every movement so you could learn from the very best.
Unfortunately, we don’t have the ability to do this for Wayne Gretzky, or really any sportspeople for that matter.
But we do for games like Fortnite.
You see, there is literally an infinite stream of content from the best Fortnite players that you can watch for free online now and this is one of the most powerful ways to develop your game sense.
Because when you watch a Fortnite streamer you’re able to see exactly what they’re doing and listen to their thought processes. And if you don’t catch your favorite player live, you can watch their replays on Twitch or YouTube uploads.
But if you want to develop your game sense, you can’t just sit there and watch passively. No, you must be alert and really pay attention.
You must watch closely and pay attention to see exactly what they’re doing and the decisions they make. Ask yourself questions as you watch like why did they do that in a particular situation?
The great thing about watching Fortnite streams or YouTube videos is that you can pause the video and go back and watch it again in slow motion to find out exactly what’s happening.
You can take clips of your favorite moments and highlights and save them onto your computer for you to continually refer back to and learn from.
As you watch and learn from the best Fortnite players in this way you will begin to feel yourself become apart of their gameplay.
You’ll begin to model them and the decisions they make when you play Fortnite so you can take your game sense to the next level.
Game sense tip #2: Review your own gameplay
I’ve talked before about the importance of VOD reviews and how it’s one of the things that Fortnite pro players are doing that makes them so good.
And reviewing your VODs is a highly effective way to improve your game sense. Why?
Because you can literally go back in time and watch your gameplay to find out exactly what you’re doing wrong.
When you watch your Fortnite gameplay back, you’ll be surprised at how quickly you’ll spot flaws and weak points in your game. You’re making more mistakes than you think and every mistake you make is an opportunity to learn and improve.
But you’re only going to learn and improve if you actually take the time and effort to review your VODs. Again, you can’t just sit there passively and watch your replays, you must be actively looking for things to improve at.
The awesome thing about Fortnite is that it’s super easy to watch your replays back thanks to the built-in replay system. So you have no excuses not to review your gameplay.
Of course, you can record your gameplay using software like OBS to review, and that’s fine.
But I really like the Fortnite replay system for doing gameplay reviews for a couple of reasons. For example, you can change the camera view to give you a whole new perspective of the fight and this can be valuable to you.
And the replay system has an amazing secret feature that not many players know about or use that can help you to further develop your game sense skills.
You see, when you watch your gameplay using the replay system in Fortnite you can actually watch things from the perspective of your opponent.
So you can see how a fight unfolds from the eyes of your opponent. And this will allow you to see exactly how you’re positioning in fights and what you were doing wrong.
For example, you may have thought you were using the third-person perspective in Fortnite properly and taking advantage of a right-hand peak. But when you watch the gameplay back from your opponent’s perspective, you were actually showing more of your body than you thought.
This is an incredible tool for becoming a better Fortnite player and improving your game sense, so don’t skip it.
Game sense tip #3: Learn more about Fortnite
Game sense isn’t exactly how much you know about Fortnite.
But your game sense is certainly limited by your knowledge of the game.
Learning more about Fortnite is going to increase your capacity for making good decisions and improve your game sense.
Remember how at the start we said that game sense is like your game IQ? Well, learning more about Fortnite is how you can increase your game IQ because the more you know the better you will play.
For example, if you don’t know that builds have less health when they are reset, then you won’t know that you can break a wall with a single shot from your weapon and make the right play when in a box fight.
Or if you don’t know which shotgun is best when given a particular option, then you could end up choosing a sub-optimal loadout and lose the game as a result.
Or if you don’t know you can drop a port-a-fortress to save yourself when falling from a great height by landing on the tires then you’re just going to die from fall damage.
As you know, game sense is your awareness of the game and the ability to make excellent decisions. But if you don’t know that you can do something, how are you supposed to do it?
Now, how do you increase your knowledge of Fortnite?
You have a few options.
Hopefully, you’re already watching the best Fortnite players from the first tip in this post, because that’s a valuable way to learn more.
But the best way to increase your Fortnite knowledge, in my opinion, is to watch YouTube videos from people that specifically create educational content for Fortnite.
There are a bunch of great educational Fortnite creators and here are a few to get you started:
Of course, this is the best Fortnite YouTube channel.
The reason I think YouTube videos are so good to learn from is they stimulate your visual and auditory senses. So as you listen to explanations with the visual content to back it up, you’re going to learn even faster.
You can also read guides about Fortnite. Reading is an excellent way to learn because you can generally read information faster than you can listen to it.
But, unfortunately, there aren’t as many good Fortnite blogs as there are good YouTube channels. Except this one, of course.
The Fortnite competitive subreddit and the Fortnite Battle Royale University subreddit can sometimes have useful gems of information, so it’s worth visiting those to learn more about the game, too.
But watching videos and reading guides won’t do anything for you unless you follow this next tip.
Game sense tip #4: Write down what you’ve learned in your own words
So far you’ve learned that you can improve your Fortnite game sense by watching the best players, analyzing your own gameplay, and learning from people that know more than you.
But the most important thing that you must do is write down the things that you learn in your own words. Because when you go through the physical act of writing things down, you will solidify those words in your memory.
Writing things down will also help you to process your thoughts and they will become more focused and clear. William James, the great American psychologist, once remarked that he did not know what he thought until he had written his thoughts down.
Listen, anyone can watch a helpful video or read a useful post and think “wow that was really good, I’m definitely going to use that some time”. But when it actually comes down to apply what you’ve learned you don’t because you don’t remember it.
Until you write things down you’re unlikely to remember it. This is why we’re taught to write so much in schools.
But I don’t recommend that you take notes while you’re listening along to a video or reading a post. Because if you take notes then you’re not fully listening or paying attention to the content. And you’re probably just going to copy exactly what is said anyway, and then you’re not really learning.
Instead, you want to wait until you’ve got until the end of the video or a post, and then write down what you’ve learned in your own words.
But if there’s something particularly noteworthy in the content that you are reviewing, then you absolutely can and should pause to take a note of it. You can keep a journal containing all of your notes near to you so that you can regularly review it.
Of course, as well as writing things down, you also have to actually apply it in a game. This is an important step in your learning process.
Something else you can do is speak out loud as you play. Keep a running monologue of your thought process, as if you’re having a dialogue with yourself.
This will take you out of auto-pilot mode so you’re actually engaged in what you’re doing, and it can give you some interesting insights into how you think and process things.
I know it may seem a bit weird, but give it a try.
Game sense tip #5: Play different games
I know it sounds counterintuitive and maybe even silly.
But you really can learn a lot about Fortnite by playing different games.
How do you think that certain players are already good at a game, even on their first try?
Of course, they haven’t even played the game long enough to develop the mechanics or game sense for the game. They just know what to do.
You see, when you play and learn about other games you will increase your overall game IQ because every game teaches you something new, and this will translate over to Fortnite.
Obviously, it helps to play games that have mechanics or gameplay similar to Fortnite. For example, you could play another battle royale game to increase your battle royale IQ. Or you could play shooters like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive or Overwatch to improve your aiming mechanics.
Heck, you could even play something completely different like a MOBA such as League of Legends. Because this will really activate your brain and force you into learning mode, which can be beneficial.
Look, if you’ve been playing Fortnite for a long time without a break then this can be unproductive and result in burnout.
As you take a break from Fortnite to play new games you’ll give your brain the opportunity to subconsciously process all the things that you’ve been learning, so you can improve when you’re not even playing.
I think you’ll be surprised at how much better you can get when you do something as simple as taking a break and play something new.
Conclusion
You may think that you already have a good understanding of Fortnite. But Fortnite is a surprisingly deep game and there are always new things to learn.
Of course, your game sense skills are going to get better as you continue to play Fortnite, just like your mechanical skills would.
But when you apply the art of deliberate practice and follow the tips in this post, your game sense will develop even faster.
Listen, whatever success you experience in a game of Fortnite is the accumulation of a bunch of small decisions that you made throughout the game.
And your success or failure in a particular game is usually not the result of one terrible event or bad decision, even though it may sometimes look that way.
Rather, your success is determined by all the small decisions that you make in every moment of the game. From the smallest micro-decision to larger decisions.
My hope is that when you apply all the game sense tips that you’ve learned from this post, you’ll find yourself making better decisions in every game, so you can further develop your game sense and meet your full potential.