They lost their kids to Fortnite
macleans.ca
macleans.ca
That said, I do believe that online games ratings should take into account additional factors like monetization models, expected screen time, tendency to be habit-forming, and that information presented to the parents. Really I feel that parents are underequipped these days to deal with the volume and types of media their kids have the ability to consume.
They are an industry made group to prevent a government run and mandated alternative, so they will never do anything that causes significant monetary losses to the industry, like labeling games with gacha mechanics as "M". The ESRB will not help parents stay away from exploitative "monetization mechanics" unless forced by regulation.
Yet another example of "Self regulation" not working.
But the problem is wider than gaming. In the UK there's a recognised problem of "missing students" - kids who switched to homeschooling during 2020 but never switched back. Parents report the kids are unusually anxious and frightened of returning to school.
As someone without children it's hard for me to opine. I don't think games are entirely blameless - they're designed to hook you in, that's their business model, they probably have some habit-forming effects. But the kind of psychological dependence described here, sounds like the gaming is a proxy for something else.
That article starts with a child called Cody, and he's clearly going through something. Socially withdrawn, screaming when he isn't allowed to play, breaking down a door so he can return to his games console. But also: diagnosed with ADHD, no longer succeeding at school sports, going through the pandemic.
The article is vague about exactly what treatment he receives but it's serious enough to include medication. It all adds up to what sounds like a more serious underlying condition, with gaming as symptom rather than cause.
I don't like today's youth, but we're really doing them a disservice by refusing to do anything about the fact that these places we force them to attend ~40 hours a week keep turning into literal warzones and nobody's doing anything about it. If there was a single instance of a shooting at your workplace, you bet your ass there would be material security improvements next week. One of the most boring places I ever worked had fucking mantraps firewalling areas. This wasn't the Pentagon, this was an insurance company.
Everyone in a school is a sitting duck-- if not from gunmen, then from new forms of covert bullying that do not lead to actionable intervention. It's made all the worse when the bullies are the ones that get sympathy and support.
That's all before nonsense like zero-tolerance (punishes both the victim and offender), NCLB and "intelligent design."
The effect being, you go to school and sit around waiting to become someone's victim or pawn one way or another. The politics of American schools are indistinguishable from those of our minimum-security prisons; everyone is constantly anxious, frightened, and screaming there too. Risk of spontaneous murder is also high.
If I were a kid these days, I would refuse to attend any [public] school in most of the US. It's a failed institution.
In that same 13-year window, ~45,000 children will be killed in a motor vehicle incident, meaning that assuming equal distribution over schools, there's a 35% chance that a student at your child's school will be killed via a motor vehicle during their childhood. If refusing to go to school for a 0.2% chance of a shooting is rational, how is getting a car not equally so? After all, except for the teens driving at age 15.5 and up, these kids are passengers, and have no control over their safety in a car, just like they have no control of their safety at school.
> If refusing to go to school for a 0.2% chance of a shooting is rational, how is getting a car not equally so?
All valid points. I know the stats are what they are--by rights they should be terrified of being on the road--but this is about optics.
The lack of any response to what they [incorrectly] perceive as a threat sends the message that nobody cares about them. If enough people feel unsafe at work, security patrols will increase to project the appearance of safety. In this case, we're dealing with scared children...it wouldn't take banning all guns to change that. Shitshows like Uvalde do the opposite-- where even the cops are seen quivering in fear. Unlike their usual nonsense ("I can't get a job, my Munchausen's is flaring up!" or "You're abusive for not buying me a car!"), the kids have no demands on this one. They're begging for help.
Ignoring that is only going to foster resentment, antisocial and sociopathic behavior; we give money to the poor to keep their knives away from our throats (and alas, food stamp programs are being defunded as we speak). These kids are the same demographic we expect will take up arms (irony) to defend the country when/if we have any kind of foreign conflict; meanwhile our two adversaries have been working very hard over the last decade to groom them for defection by selling them the idea that they can have everything for free under Communism.
My point was mostly that I wouldn't blame them for welcoming a change in management. We do nothing to win anybody's hearts or minds. Even the case in TFA, in Canada-- we treat kids like a pool of idiots to exploit with blinky lights, loot crates and smartphones, and signal that we'll just leave them for dead if they feel threatened. The psychologists they go cry to have peers helping companies engineer these very outcomes.
I dunno; threats and occurrences of actual violence are shrugged off pretty frequently by hospitals.
And my old high school? Sure, you have to have an ID card to get in, but the doors are still fully glass. You don't need a gun to get in; a brick would do the job. And it's private. The public schools are even worse. Wife worked for a couple of years in a downtown admin job at the local public school system; one of their few duties in schools was to proctor standardized tests several times a year. I took her to one in a very rough area that had metal detectors even 20+ years ago. It went off when we walked through, but no cops or security officers were present, and one of the students just told us to ignore it, because they all did. This - in a school that had bullet holes in the windows and ceilings (which, to be fair, were probably just potshots from the apartments across a ditch from the school that were fired when nobody was actually in the building).
I see fortnite and games no different than the social media addiction that many people suffer from. The author rightly pointed that out. With a lack of social life allowed people were searching for anything that made them feel like they belong.
For myself, I was isolated during my highschool years and turned to online gaming and youtube communities. Back in 2010 it was less prevalent and definitely less predatory. It gives me some empathy for children and people today.
This article feels like a scapegoat article targeted towards Fortnite instead of a larger social anxiety issue. The author does touch on it, but not as much as I would have liked.
Thanks for sharing!
It hits me indirectly since I'm not addicted to games but still talk about games...
Maybe I'm just old, and I don't get it, but I feel like EQ was way more addictive than Fortnite and explicitly developed to be so. The intermittent reward structure, the social aspect of it, etc.
Like someone else said, the OG of hardcore engagement maximization. I guess I don't have too much to add to the discussion but I think games have become _less_ addictive over time. Social media seems to have taken over in that regard.
We'll never know if the framing of the parents desire to revert their child to previous interests is genuine, or the author reading into their notes on the "What was he like before" question. Without that insight I don't think I would weigh in one way or the other.
Either way they are not going to get their child to reengage with previous hobbies. They will need new ones, or need to engage in activities (likely other video games) with the child, who will dislike that at first.
This isn't new. We had kids playing counter strike until 5am on top of school in the 200*s. They had tournament.com for gambling on games before in game purchases were a thing. IRC chats (and vent) before twitch.
I have trouble believing the biggest factor is purely the game, I think we just have a spotlight on this child as it's happening and we didn't have that 20 years ago.
Edit: I think wanting to be famous on twitch, over wanting to be in the top 10 rankings for a game is a new development.