Why you shouldn’t worry about your kid playing Fortnite

FORTNITE does not signal the end of the world, any more than the Rolling Stones did when they were scandalising your parents, writes Alice Clarke. Here’s an idea; why not play the game with your kids?

IF you’ve been anywhere near someone under the age of 25 recently, you’ve probably heard of the battle-royale game Fortnite.

Or maybe you’ve heard about it from one of the many articles decrying it as the beginning of the end of civilisation.

Either way, it’s everywhere, and parents who aren’t all that familiar with video games seem very concerned about it.

For the uninitiated, Fortnite was inspired by last year’s mega-popular PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (aka PUBG), where 100 players are dropped out of a plane on to an island and have to collect weapons to take out other players in the hope of becoming the last one standing.

While PUBG was hide-and-seek for loner adults, Fortnite’s cartoonish style, offbeat humour, bright colours, universal availability (PC, Xbox One, PS4, mobile and now Nintendo Switch) and $0 price tag made it instantly popular with kids. You can pay money to buy outfits and items, but none of those affect gameplay, so the poor kids can still beat the rich kids, even if they’re not wearing the coolest outfits while doing so.

The game can also be played in groups of two or more, allowing for socialisation and teamwork.

Luke Flower, 10, is playing Fortnite in his family's garage-turned arcade room. (Pic: Sarah Matray)

Yes, the game does have weapons and violence, but it’s no more graphic than what you’d find in Saturday morning cartoons.

Fortnite probably isn’t going to teach your kid maths, but it’s not the cultural Chernobyl many fear. Games like Fortnite teach problem-solving, foster team work, promote longer attention spans, encourage persistence, and can help create social bonds between children who otherwise might never have interacted. Plus, if they’re really good at it, publisher Epic Games has announced a $100 million prize pool for tournaments.

If you’re concerned about your child participating in a new hobby that you don’t understand, which is very different from anything you did as a kid, the recent news stories quoting faux experts who have never seen the game probably haven’t helped.

The good news is that there is no evidence that video games make people more aggressive. That line has been pushed since the Columbine shooting in the 90s but, no matter what you might hear on morning TV, time and again research in peer-reviewed journals has shown that violent video games don’t make players more aggressive, nor do they negatively affect their empathy or impulse control.

The bad news is that you have finally turned into the adults you used to mock when you were your kid’s age.

Gamers deep into a session of Fortnite at the 24th Electronic Expo this week. (Pic: Frederic J. Brown)

Every year there is a new thing that children and teenagers love, that their parents’ generation is convinced will bring about the End Times, turning The Youth into serial killers who fail high school. When I was in primary school it was Pokemon cards, and in high school the root of all evil was the internet. In my mother’s youth, it was rock’n’roll and the Rolling Stones. We’re all fine.

What made the difference was how our parents reacted to these crazes. My parents supported my love of music and computers, so I shared it with them and we bonded by going to gigs. One of my friends at the time had parents who were less supportive; they took away and smashed any CDs they didn’t approve of while she was at school. She stopped trusting them and instead got better at keeping secrets from them, slowly making her behaviour more extreme.

I recently had a woman proudly tell me her way of dealing with her son’s interest in Fortnite: as soon as his grades started to dip, she took away his PS4 for good and had her husband smash all of his games in front of him. I bet you $50 that that boy won’t trust his parents again, is definitely still playing the game at his friends’ houses, and will never share another important hobby with his parents.

Why not sit down and play the game with your kids? Find out why they love it, learn how to do some of the dance moves, and turn this into a bonding experience with your resident adolescent. Games are the fastest growing entertainment medium, and they’re not going anywhere.

Yes, it’s new and different from what you used to do when you were young, but one of the best parts of having children is letting them introduce you to new worlds you never would have considered otherwise.

Alice Clarke is a freelance journalist and Sunday Herald Sun video game reviewer.

@Alicedkc