Fortnite Season 5 has officially arrived — bringing new features, a new maps, and new skins. Parents can anticipate battles over the amount of time spent playing the game to “level up” with your teens.
If you are not familiar with this game, then it likely means that you are not the parent of a teenager (I nearly wrote “teenage boy,” but it is important to appreciate the growth of female gamers). Admittedly, as the parent of two little girls, I was not familiar with the game until my husband, Dr. Mark A. Novitsky Jr., a board-certified child and adolescent outpatient psychiatrist shared with alerted me to the growing number of kids who were struggling with addiction to the game in his practice. Around late winter-early spring, he started to see an uptick in parental-child conflict over this game in his private practice. He has been helping parents with effective limit setting but also notes the important social ramifications that online gaming has with maintaining peer relationships.
For those of you who were like me and were not familiar with the game, it is an online shooting game with the sole purpose of survival — think of Hunger Games meets Minecraft (building structures is essential in this game). One-hundred total online participants launch into an arena for a winner-takes-all battle (either alone against 99 others, as a team of two against 49 other duos or as a foursome against 24 other squads). It is free to play, but with enticing in-app-purchases and battle pass challenges, the game becomes even more addictive as rewards are unlocked the more you play and win. With accomplishments, a player can rise the ranks up to the most prestigious level 100. Unique “Skins” can distinguish elite gamers from the run of the mill. These elite gamers are likely to be online celebrities with followers watching clips of their incredible gameplay on Twitch, where the most followed gamer goes by Ninja and has around 10,000,000 followers at the time of this blog post.
Dr. Novitsky, we need help, and we are losing the battle. What can we do? How much is too much?
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