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'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.
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.
Their parents were raised in the era of video games! They know exactly what it's like!
A "vidogames are bad" story presented uncritically on Slashdot? My how we've fallen from a nerd-centric site. Jack Thompson would be proud of what Slashdot has become.
Err, high-UID Slashdotters do know who Jack Thompson is, right? Get off my lawn!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's always fault of something.
"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."
Who finds out about that and then thinks its a video game issue.
Seems to me the parents suck ass.
Although, video games to have an impact on people, and to thing there is no effect, especially to a developing mind, would be foolish.
But this? this is bad parenting. Should have had his system removed from him a lot sooner.
Give him so old laptop that can't run it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Get real, folks. Breaking the windshield doesn't destroy the car; it's still completely drivable, it just needs the windshield replaced.
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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.
http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
I'm pretty sure everything would have suffered. School, social life, family life. I can totally see that. I'd like to think my mom and dad would have put some kind of limits on it, but honestly I kind of doubt it.
My 12 year old stopped playing it, voluntarily. He now plays Rainbow Six: Siege and Apex Legends. And Terraria.
“Enough games, [go outside and play / do your homework / do these chores / let’s do something else ...]”
I was a kid once, they had video games then too, and they were very compelling and if I had my way I would be playing them all the time. When my parents told me to stop I was mad at them. Because I was so close to winning and or I was having a good run.
But turning off the video games isn’t abuse. And you shouldn’t be allowing your kid to play games at the cost of their health and education.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
In my day we had Everquest to ruin our lives.
Oh no it's the video game! Video games are bad m'kay!
I mean, it couldn't possibly be that we have an entire generation of parents that can't be bothered to actually do what they're supposed to and be.. you know... parents? Parents have gotten into the habit of treating electronic devices as babysitters. I was in a restaurant the other day and was stuck beside a family with a toddler. The toddler wouldn't stop making a scene until they dropped a tablet in front of them and played some annoying youtube video. I ended up having to move to a different table cause it was so breathtakingly annoying.
It's called disciplining your child. They won't stop play to come eat, you make them stop, by whatever reasonable means necessary. Your children are not your friends. They're your effing children. YOU are responsible for teaching them what it means to be a healthy well-functioning adult. If you can't handle that, then don't have children.
There is literally *always* something for a child to obsess about. Fortnite is nothing special.
But naturally people won't take responsibility for their actions, so "blame everything but me" circlejerk resumes anew.
If you're, say, 25 or older, you've probably been socialized enough growing up to at least be less susceptible to it, but if you're younger than that, you've grown up around the cancer we refer to as so-called 'social media', and as such have been spoon-fed the falsehood that 'sharing' on the internet is somehow being 'social', when in fact all it does is give you an excuse to be anti-social, avoiding actual human contact. These days, you could theoretically go through your entire life never having any substantial direct contact with another human being, thanks to 'social media' the Internet in general; you can order literally anything you need to sustain your life right of the internet and have it drop-shipped right to your door and never even have to talk to the delivery person, even, and they're working on eliminating the need for humans to deliver packages, too. Add all this to a popular online multiplayer video game like Fortnight, and of course you end up with people ruining their lives over it. By the way the same thing happened with World of Warcraft, as you may recall, but it's probably even worse this time with Fortnight.
FFS people, video games are addictive. Are you really this clueless?
love is just extroverted narcissism
in the film "Ready Player One", the end scenes, the new owners of the VR Game decide to shut the entire game down, one day a week.
except, the new owners portray *ethical* responsibility that, unfortunately, would be financially irresponsible as far as the enactment of the Articles of Incorporation of a profit-maximising Corporation. bottom line: if Epic Games actually tried to do something as socially responsible as shut Fornite off for one day a week, their shareholders could legitimately sue them for adversely affecting profits, and the Directors would be prosecuted and struck off as a result.
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!
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
I will say as a parent that it's very difficult to allow Fortnite as a "sometimes" thing.
The kids themselves have zero self control, there is no self-management of game play. You're literally yelling at them to quit.
You can prevent them from playing at all, but you wind up with the ironic situation where the kids who they used to do stuff with in meat space aren't available because they're playing Fortnite.
The best we've been able to manage (short of a total, permanent ban) is making play contingent on grades and barring it on school nights. You get all As and Bs in school, you can play on weekends or when there's no school. My kid lost it for a month when his grades slipped, and there was constant angling for exceptions or complaining about how unfair it was.
The other strategy we haven't tried is trying to organize a multi-family Fortnite "holiday" where no kid can play. There's multiple challenges here, from the fact that 8th grade boys have a very amorphous and weak social circle in real life to other parents refusing to go along with it for various reasons -- "my kid doesn't have a problem", parents you don't know, and some percentage of parents who see Fortnite as the greatest babysitter ever.
Most people aren't strung out on heroin.. But we don't declare "Heroin isn't a problem!". Maybe it's time to understand that, for some people, these games are a problem.. I've read a couple of study blurbs that talked about the link between addiction and serotonin levels in people. These same studies show that, for some people, social media / games / you name it will generate these addictive levels of serotonin. It's a small percentage but so is the percentage for heroin addicts..
Few things in life are YES/NO, BLACK/WHITE, ONE/OTHER. There are shades of grey. Most people do fine with video games.. For some people they become life consuming. I've watched it with my own eyes.. This doesn't mean we have to implement regulations.. But maybe we could fun a couple of really comprehensive studies.. Get all the facts and then decide, as a society, what to do about it..
Standing up and declaring that "video games aren't a problem" might be 99.8% accurate.. But that .2% inaccuracy (if it exists) would affect a HUGE amount of people in a nation as large as the US (or in a collection of nations as large as the EU). If nothing else, it bears further study and perhaps some level of monitoring/data gathering on how many people are being treated for video game addiction (if any) and data of that type..
But, it's pretty hard to have a useful discussion about anything when the data seems to be lacking..
A couple years ago, my older child started sipping into addiction but with another game title: Ark: Survival Evolved. Once I realized it, I cut his play time to 2 hours Saturday and 2 hours Sunday, either between 10 AM and noon or between 2 PM and 4 PM. Mon-Fri were off limits as far as games were involved.
It was quite a battle at first, when this rule came into place, but with patience and resolve it got sorted out.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
In the 1930's B.F. Skinner found that a variable schedule of reinforcement could cause rats to push a lever unto death. In the 1950's an implanted electrode was even more impressively compelling. In the 1970's John B. Calhoun noted modern human behaviors among his rats of NIMH. I recently camped outside a casino in their parking lot and imagined their never-to-be-seen truth-in-advertising sign to read, "WELCOME TO OUR SKINNER BOX RATS OF NIMH!"
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/compass-pleasure_n_890342
http://www.sustainable.soltechdesigns.com/critical-mass.html
Posting AC for obvious reasons.
My parents attempted similar approach when I was teenager and was playing too much games. This decision nearly ruined my life, as when I went to university and there was no longer oversight I went off the deep end. Nearly failed out and it took me extra year to finish my degree.
Now I am in my mid 30s, have family, kids, and a well-paying job. I still play computer games, sometimes with my spouse, sometimes with kids. With everything else I do manage at least 5 hours of gaming a week, often more. I still pull all-nighters and book vacation from work when exiting new game releases.
The issue with your approach is that for your kids games are better than almost anything else available. All you are doing is withholding something very desirable. Instead you should try unrestricted game play one summer, once they waste entire summer playing games, with cutting into sleep and hygiene, there will be internal realization that some balance is needed. From there, it will be possible to find balance without constant external oversight.
If you don't provide any proof for your claim "nope" is as good an argument as yours.
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.
We get a ton of pressure to buy Fortnite skins or other in-game items. So far the compromise is he can buy one item per month, and it has to be bought with his own PS currency cards that he buys with his own cash. One of the limiting factors is he has to get his own ass over to the Walgreens to buy the card.
He started in over wanting some other high-dollar item, headphones I think, and was angling for a parent subsidy. I took out a sheet of paper and did the math on what he spent on Fortnite add-ons and showed how he could actually buy it if he wasn't spending money on Fortnite skins. A light went on, but you could just see the weird, gambler-like cost-benefit analysis going on that said the headphones weren't as valuable to him as having the occasional Fortnite skin.
We make him save some portion of his allowance (which he earns through chores) and the money he makes shoveling for our neighbor, but are pretty liberal about allowing him to spend (or waste..) his spending money on whatever he thinks is useful. I think it staves off some obsession with not buying them and lets him feel in control and make his own choices. He's got a whole life ahead of him evaluating consumerist compulsions.
I agree with the oddly social aspect of the game. He is always playing with 2-3 kids he knows from school or the neighborhood, and the running conversation doesn't stop.
I sometimes wonder if some of this is a byproduct of kids lacking the free-range outside the house options we had as kids. Our moms were always booting us out of the house. And it's not like we were engaging in constructive activities out of the house, we road our bikes far from home, we played in/near the creek where it wouldn't have been hard to drown, and in middle school used to ride our bike to the river (the Mississippi river!) and climb on the undersides of bridges. We crossed the river on multiple bridge archways and catwalks, hugely dangerous in retrospect.