Fortnite: Battle Royale craze consumes children’s time, drives parents mad
PARENTS have been warned a Hunger Games-style video game sweeping the world has the potential to turn kids into addicts as they compete to kill each other on screen.
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PARENTS have been warned a Hunger Games-style video game sweeping the world has the potential to turn kids into addicts as they compete to kill each other on screen.
Unlike shooter games targeting imaginary villains, Fortnite: Battle Royale pits up to 100 players against each other in a savage fight to the death using everything from rocket launchers, grenades and assault rifles to crossbows, pickaxes and pump-action shotguns.
With participants dropped on an island to stalk each other until only one is left, it has been a raging success since launching last September on PC, Xbox and PlayStations, with 45 million players signed up.
But experts predict the game, which is free to play but rated unsuitable for under 12s, will explode in popularity and become the next Pokemon Go with its imminent launch on mobile phones.
That has some experts and parents alarmed, with reports of teenagers playing Battle Royal obsessively for hours at a time. Players have even posted their “top 10 kills of the week” on YouTube, which rack up hundreds of thousands of views.
Beverley Park mum Mary Rezk, 40, said the game was “like a drug” to her three boys, who would play “at any opportunity they could”.
“All they do is fight about who wants to play and the yelling ... it’s just slightly driving me up the wall,” she said of her sons aged 14, nine and six.
“They’re just so obsessed with it. I just hear them screaming half the time.”
The chaos was so bad that she ended up banning them from playing during the week.
Gymea Bay mum Lisa Purvis busted her 14-year-old son Dylan playing the game in his room at 4am. “He’s completely addicted,” she said.
Engadine player Tom Benhiam, 11, reckons that guns are for chumps — the coolest way to kill someone is by “knocking them off a cliff with an impulse grenade”.
He said he could spend 2½ hours playing with his friends in a single day despite being restricted to 30 minutes during the week.
“I love the game a lot. I’m pretty obsessed with it. I’ll wake up at like 5am, get dressed then I’ll play for two hours before school. Then when I go to bed I play for another 30 minutes.”
His mum Kirsten, 47, admitted the game was “quite gory” but said the cartoon graphics somewhat lessened the impact.
“It’s all in this cartoon, comic-type style so he knows it’s not real,” she said.
“At first all the violence on the video games used to really worry me but I found once they are over a certain age they don’t want to play the Lego or nice games, it doesn’t help their interests.”
US President Donald Trump raised concerns about violent video games this month after the Florida school shooting, questioning whether “the level of violence is really shaping young people’s thoughts”.
Child and adolescent psychologist Dr Michael Carr-Gregg said Fortnite: Battle Royale could be problematic for kids who played in an “obsessive way”.
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“For them this will interfere with sleep, it will interfere with obviously homework and it’ll interfere with normal relationships at home,” he said.
But he said the majority of young people distinguished between fact and fantasy.
“Just because they’re firing arrows at people in the video games, it doesn’t mean they’re going to go out and fire arrows in real life,” he said.
“Quite clearly that’s the case given the example of Grand Theft Auto, where you’re shooting police at the time — there’d be no police left.”
The concept of the game is simple. Players parachute onto the map and must scavenge for armour, weapons and resources to help them take out opponents.
But it’s a race against time to achieve these goals before a storm shrinks the map and forces them to confront others.
The game is rated for players aged 12 and above but Gamespot associate editor Eddie Makuch said it typically attracted a younger audience.