'Fortnite' May be a Virtual Game, But It's Having Real-life, Dangerous Effects (bostonglobe.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: "They are not sleeping. They are not going to school. They are dropping out of social activities. A lot of kids have stopped playing sports so they can do this." Michael Rich, a pediatrician and director of the Clinic for Interactive Media and Internet Disorders at Boston Children's Hospital, was talking about the impact "Fortnite: Battle Royale" -- a cartoonish multiplayer shooter game -- is having on kids, mainly boys, some still in grade school. "We have one kid who destroyed the family car because he thought his parents had locked his device inside," Rich said. "He took a hammer to the windshield."

A year and a half since the game's release, Rich's account is just one of many that describe an obsession so intense that kids are seeing doctors and therapists to break the game's grip, in some cases losing so much weight -- because they refuse to stop playing to eat -- that doctors initially think they're wasting away from a physical disease. The stress on families has become so severe that parents are going to couples' counselors, fighting over who's to blame for allowing "Fortnite" into the house in the first place and how to rein in a situation that's grown out of control. Further reading: 'Fortnite' Creator Sees Epic Games Becoming as Big as Facebook, Google.

Comments

Where are the parents?

[DarkRookie2]

I mean really.
My parents would steal the cables for my consoles, take away my Gameboy, and not allow any internet based on my systems MAC address.
I was allowed books, radio, and outside.

Re:Where are the parents?

[BringsApples]

My kid loves to play fortnighte but we keep him busy with other activities, too. Sure, some days he may play fortnighte for a couple of hours straight, but even on those days, he'll self-adjust, and go outside after feeling bored. If all the kids are doing is playing video games, why WOULDN'T they flip out when it suddenly has to stop? It's become their norm. This is how Nature works.

If you're a parent of a kid that's into fortnighte don't be alarmed by news like this, just make sure that your kid(s) have other required activity too. It's just a game folks.

Yeah, experts know better

[Cajun Hell]

Their parents not only get to play video games, but they drink a sixpack every night, take various legal opioids, possibly semi-legal pot, and an occasional treat of coke or meth, go to church on Sunday, have one-night-stands to prove to themselves that they're desirable, collect porn by the Terabyte that they'll never have time to watch, blow paychecks at casinos, overeat, check slashdot/reddit/facebook 20 times per day each, and occasionally start a fire or steal something for a little excitement on the side.

They ought to be experts!

Re:Totally not the parents . . .

[cayenne8]

Beat the kid with a belt, and make him/her chop wood for a week. that should solve it.

Trouble is...in many places in the US, you do that now (something that used to be the norm not that long ago) and you'll soon have child protective services removing your children and find the police charging you with abuse/assautl/battery and you'll be in jail....all just because you didn't "spare the rod"....

Of course there is a difference between 'beating' and corporal punishment, but in much of society today, they've outlawed even proper corporal punishment.

I know myself and most of my peers grew up with the occasional ass whupping, and I firmly believe it helped us.

Kids run wild today because often parents are hampered from dealing out proper punishment when it is called for.

Re:Retards - the kids AND the parents.

[Anonymous Coward]

All this talk of more than four hours a week playing video games being an addiction shows we really, really have lost sight of where we came from. Without the addictive nature of videogames, programming, and technology in general, most of us would not have our sky-high incomes.

The career required putting in tens of hours a week into computers to get the knowledge, skills, and familiarity for our professions. Most of us started that process by playing videogames for far too many hours and now we are denying that to our children, but still expect them to be competitive in a more demanding working world.

We are doing a disservice to them, giving them less opportunities to immerse themselves in the way that led us to excellent careers in an economy where H1-B replacements and globalization did not put us up against the entire world. Our children will not be as skilled as we were at the same age. Our children will not be competitive with technology after highschool without a couple thousand hours of actual experience being competitive with technology.