Player Count One

Tiyan Baker’s Player Count One uses Fortnite to reimagine her mother’s ancestral homeland in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, in a playable map. With satellite data and 3D modelling, she rebuilds the Bung Sadung mountain range – home of the Bukar Bidayǔh people – as a personal sandbox.

The map includes a hand-built longhouse and other traditional features, and her in-game avatar carries custom inventory: a durian grenade and a traditional Bidayǔh hat transformed into a parachute, sculptural versions of which you can see here.

This work explores what it means to live and play on Indigenous land in a virtual world. In Fortnite’s sandbox, Baker builds a space of joy, resistance and remembrance – one she can inhabit on her own terms.

Online games can be more than escape: they offer space to dream and find belonging. Player Count One is an act of digital return – a reclamation of land and culture in a world where the physical may not yet allow it.