![]() ![]() ![]() I know that the Fortnite contagion will eventually run its course. It's like a zombie attack, but this time it's the zombies' brains that are being eaten.īack in the 1980s, I myself battled a serious case of chronic Pac-Man fever, so I understand that, like all things, this, too, shall pass. They travel in hordes throughout the neighbourhood, playing at one house until their welcome wears out, at which time the entire pack travels, en masse, to another house or apartment, until again being banished. The next minute it fanned itself into a wildfire of fiendish preoccupation that has consumed these kids from the inside and left them empty shells of the people they used to be. One minute it mustered just a spark of interest as the latest popular videogame. A quick, albeit unscientific, survey of neighbourhood parents confirmed that nearly every single kid I know has become utterly obsessed with this videogame. One tethered to a headset, his blank gaze fixed onto the screen, rapt in a conversation (with whom I could only guess) about looting or gathering wood or metal, while the other sat, doe-eyed, tracking “the storm” and counting down how many of the 100 initial players were still left in the game.Īnd it's not just my sons. By the time I got out of bed, around 6.30am, I would find them already up and in front of the game. It was sometime over spring break I noticed that my 10- and 12-year-olds were actually waking themselves early in the morning to get their fixes. Compared with many of the shoot-'em-up games out there it's pretty tame – if not outright lame.įar more troublesome is how completely addictive it appears to be. In fact, in Fortnite there is essentially no blood or guts to speak of. While Fortnite is full of bullets, guns and grenades, it thankfully spares us the gore. They lie outright about the number of first-place victories they've accumulated.īut it's by no means the game's violent content that has me so distressed. They debate endlessly about which is better: the pump-action shotgun or the bolt-action sniper rifle? And they brag dubiously about how many kills they had in their big second-place finish yesterday. They use words like “epic” and “legendary” in strange and unfamiliar ways and drone on about places I've never heard of, like “Tilted Towers” and “Lucky Landing”. They quickly become strung out and irritable if away from their PlayStation 4 or Xbox for more than a few hours. These zombies, who used to be our children, all exhibit the same symptoms of addiction, such as fading interests in all other activities and being suddenly incapable of engaging in conversations about any other topic. Over the last two months, Fortnite has developed a grip so tight on the kids in our neighbourhood that I have heard several parents discuss starting a support group for our little videogame junkies. I'm speaking, of course, of Fortnite, the videogame. What we are looking at here is an epidemic, a pestilence that's sweeping across the country, spreading like an infectious disease.Ī virtual tsunami, rolling over the American landscape and swallowing 10- to 16-year-old boys with an insidious ease I would have thought impossible until it swept through my house and took both my boys right from under my nose. ![]()
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