Education matters

Panic! Panic! There is a new game around that is stealing our children’s innocence and turning them into good-for-nothing brainwashed zombies; allegedly.

If you read all of the online articles citing the danger of the new game Fortnite and its addictive qualities you wouldn’t let your children anywhere near a console again. 

The game is described as a menace and is usually accompanied by dubious stories of children who would do anything rather than leave their screens such as wet themselves, starve themselves or dehydrate, all generally garbage, of course, but all stories that exacerbate the myth and ultimately increase the popularity of the game. It makes you wonder where these ‘stories’ are coming from.

Now, rather than buy into the mass hysteria over what is essentially a child’s game, I thought I’d try to understand it a little better, working on the premise that if you can’t beat them, join them and so I set about my first mission on my son’s PlayStation4, (much to his hilarity). 

As you would imagine I was useless; all fingers and thumbs. On my first mission I was shot dead in seven seconds and to make matters worse, the player that shot me did a victory dance; like I said, useless.

The thing is though, even though I was rubbish and only lasted seconds. I wasn’t giving up there, I wanted to improve on my mission, not because I had been brainwashed by an evil corporation making me sit at the console all night on a wet patch, but because it is actually a very entertaining and absorbing game. 

I think that this is the key point that scaremongers and mumsnet fail to see, so I will spell it out, children enjoy being entertained and will seek out these forms of entertainment because they are fun.

So, the anti-fun police keep telling parents that games like Fortnite are bad for our kids and that they will grow up copying the violence they see. Yet, children keep playing them. Why? It’s because they are fun and parents keep buying them.

Parents, you can’t have your cake and eat it. You can’t buy your children electronic gadgetry that makes them happy and then tell them off for using it. They are children, they play with things. 

The responsibility for how and when they play with them, now that you can control and that’s when an exciting word called parenting steps into the debating arena.

Xboxes and PlayStations aren’t demons. They are toys and toys that can be switched off. Fortnite is a fun strategy game that requires participants to plan and scheme in order to survive, it is not a dormant activity and nor does it spell the end of humanity. 

So please, rather than demonising the children who play Fortnite and the product that they play, let’s start turning our attention to the parents who let their children become obsessed and start introducing some accountability there, because if you’re lazy enough to use a PlayStation as a baby sitter, don’t blame your children for the mistakes that you make.