Slashdot Mirror
Addiction To Fortnite Cited In Over 200 Divorce Petitions (dailydot.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
In just the last 35 weeks, one online divorce site received over 200 petitions citing addiction to Fortnite and other online games as one of the reasons someone wanted a divorce. "[T]he dawn of the digital revolution has introduced new addictions," said a spokesperson for the company, also citing online pornography and social media. "These numbers equate to roughly 5% of the 4,665 petitions we have handled since the beginning of the year and as one of the largest filers of divorce petitions in the UK, is a pretty good indicator."
On the other hand, the A.V. Club notes that the web site's creators "have a vested interest in making divorce seem sexy and cool in a way that only 'You walked in front of the screen and a 10-year-old in Wyoming shot me dead so now I'm taking the house' truly can."
On the other hand, the A.V. Club notes that the web site's creators "have a vested interest in making divorce seem sexy and cool in a way that only 'You walked in front of the screen and a 10-year-old in Wyoming shot me dead so now I'm taking the house' truly can."
Unless there has been a comparable increase in the rate of change of the number of divorce applications, then this is a non-story.
People who want a divorce, that are required to give reason to get one, will find one. If it wasn't Fortnite, it would be something else. If it wasn't computer games, it would be something else.
in a way that only 'You walked in front of the screen and a 10-year-old in Wyoming shot me dead so now I'm taking the house' truly can.
This isn't a description of a "cool" divorce. This is a description of an "inevitable" divorce.
Fortnite is not special, neither is alcohol nor weed nor pills nor social networks. The only thing that IS special, is that our reality is intolerable for more and more people, and they find forms of escape. Can you blame them?
Actually I do blame them, because I’m old enough to remember how much worse life was fifty and sixty years ago compared to today. Racism everywhere, huge wars being fought over totally pointless causes (Ask your nail girl to describe her childhood), three billion people starving to death in India and China, massive urban air pollution, and the threat of thermonuclear annihilation hanging over our heads.
Those who forget the past are condemned to bitch about the present.
I knew about a guy who was the main tank for a guild on my server back in the days of World of Warcraft 1.0. The guy went to get a sandwich halfway through a Molten Core raid, only to discover a note from his wife saying that she had taken the kids and was leaving for Florida to be with her parents because he was too addicted to the game (apparently he had logged 120 days of played time in the first year that the game was out).
He got his sandwich and finished the raid before going after his wife and kids.
He finally got her to come back by promising that he’d auction his character off on eBay, but then he posted it for a price he knew it would never sell at and then bragged about his cleverness on his guild’s forums...which is when he discovered that his wife read the forums. In the end, he was forced to sell the character for less and their marriage survived, though by the time I quit the game a year later, he was playing again on another character.