Fortnite has been in the news a lot lately and not always in the best light. Apparently, the Fortnite craze has gotten so bad with kids they are now literally being sent to gaming rehab, according to Bloomberg and USA Today.
The main question to ask ourselves here is, who is at fault? The parents or the developers? This is not the first time one game has been blamed for getting kids addicted. GTA in the past was blamed for something similar. Now we have Fortnite, which has over 200 million registered users and growing!
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According to the original report from Bloomberg, one mom has it very bad with her 17-year-old son and came out publicly about it. She stated that her son Carson spends about 17 hours a day on the game and then falls asleep in class, resulting in poor grades. According to her interview, they have made progress but it’s a battle. This is one battle many parents have now spoken out about both to media outlets and online, literally begging for help for their kids. Now they are turning to professionals to give their kids a video game detox. Epic Games, asked about the addiction epidemic, has not yet commented publicly.
Comparing the game to drug addictions and lots of time invested
Are Fortnite addictions as bad as being addicted to hardcore drugs like heroin? One British expert who mainly works with kids suffering from game addiction, Lorrine Marer, seems to think so: “This game is like heroin. Once you are hooked, it’s hard to get unhooked.”
I personally would not go so far as to compare it to that. If your kid is spending more time in the game than in real life, yes, there is a real serious problem and it’s time to seek outside help. Randy Kulman, a child psychologist in Wakefield, Rhode Island, commented on the astonishing amount of time kids spend on this game: “I had a 13-year-old in my office who said he had 300 Fortnite wins. I had to stop for a minute and calculate what he had to invest just to get those.”
This seems to be an alarming problem affecting parents and kids all around the world and it isn’t going to go away anytime soon. If it’s not Fortnite it will be some other game; mark my words.
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