The Game Fortnite

How does the Game Fortnite affects students? The results are incredible for The most popular online video game on the planet today. Billions of players, including students from all countries, play Fortnite online. Fortnite consumes thousands of hours of our student’s lives. 

Fortnite is available to play on Google Play, PC, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, and other devices. Fortnite often distracts students from Google Classroom, i-Ready, and most remote learning tools. However, there are many cons and a few pros to playing Fortnite.

Gaming for students

Exciting games have managed to transcend from purely recreational to the creation of e-sports tournaments. 

Winning players have made more than 9 million dollars. Attached to this comes fame, wealth, and a massive social media following. For instance, Fortnite player Tyler Blevins has more than 14 million followers on Instagram. This person is looked up to by many young students.

Fortnite is a free-to-play platform where you can play for free and pay for extras, equipment, and accessories. Students spend hundreds of dollars on this game, including resorting to theft.

Fortnite has been able to gain ground among famous athletes such as Antoine Griezmann, and Harry Kane. Not to mention numerous YouTubers who upload themselves playing for millions of views.

Most players are young, in many cases even minors. With this article, we like to guide parents, students, and teachers. We offer advice, tips, and resourceful information so that they can best handle this game. 

Through caution, and discipline students, and parents can avoid the negative effects on their personal and academic life.

How does Fortnite affect the behavior, learning, and emotional stability of students?

It is important to clarify at first that it is not the technology itself that generates benefits or risks, it only has the potential to do so. Whether technology is more positive than negative depends on how we use it. 

Video games can be useful to promote learning, to develop analysis, reasoning, collaboration, and decision-making skills in our students. 

Fortnite Addiction

The game developer Epic Games, recommends Fortnite for teens 13 and older. This is based mainly on the open chat and violent content, the final decision is left to the parent. It is up to you to decide if your child just likes the game or has become addicted to Fortnite.

Some researchers believe that it is possible to be addicted to video games. Thus, the American Psychiatric Society (APA), and the World Health Organization (WHO) have identified a condition called “Video game disorder“ which could be considered a kind of addiction. However, more research is needed on this.

We recommend doing everything possible to take advantage of the game as an instance of intrinsic motivation, such as associating game use permissions with high or low academic performance and making it clear that during the school week, your child will not be able to play.

Unless he achieves some exceptional achievement in school or his extracurricular activities. It is important to set limits to avoid excesses or addictions in our children.

In these times of pandemics, Fortnite can help promote the socialization and learning of your children, so we should not dismiss it as bad at first glance. 

It is important to actively talk with children about what they do and listen to everything they tell you about the game, be open and receptive to what they want to tell you so that you can enter that world that they have discovered, instead of being outside. 

You could even play with them a few times, and thus make it easier to accompany your children in their training process. We must strive to understand the logic with which our children think. 

It is also important to clarify to our children that the rules of the real world still apply in Fortnite. There have been many instances of children cursing and threatening other students over Fortnite’s open chat for whatever reason, in a way that they would not normally dare to say face to face. We must make it clear to them that the rules of conduct still need to be applied.

It is also important to make sure that children have good relationships with all members of the family and get enough sleep. Both are vital to the development of a child’s life. 

Pros and Cons of Fortnite

After giving some advice, we would like to explore some of the advantages and disadvantages that Fortnite offers us as parents when it comes to stimulating our children’s learning:

Fortnite Pros

a) Develop thinking skills: in this game, you need to learn to think fast to be successful.

b) Teamwork: There are Fortnite modes where you can play with friends, which helps to develop teamwork skills.

c) Socialization: we have already said it, but it is worth repeating it. During this pandemic, online socialization is the safest and most reliable way for our children to keep in touch with their friends, and family.

d) Short time frame: each game only takes a maximum of 20 minutes, many times it takes less time, which helps to control the use of Fortnite, although you cannot fall into the temptation of “one more round”.

Cons Fortnite

a) It is a violent game: even if it is to a lesser extent than other popular games today, it is still a violent game, with weapons, violence, and death. We recommend playing it yourself or watching around on YouTube to see if you agree with the level of violence.

b) Open chat function: The open chat function, like any other online chat room, can be dangerous, seeing all kinds of insults and other inappropriate language between players. It is important to monitor this feature carefully, and disable it if the insults get too far.

c) In-app purchases: we recommend setting a parental lock so that your children cannot buy new skins and extras without your explicit permission, especially if they have your credit card connected to their gaming accounts.

d) It can be addictive: we have said it before, but it is still good to repeat it: Fortnite can be addictive if it is not properly limited.

Conclusion

We recommend that parents read this article and try as much as possible to achieve the ideal balance between control and freedom. 

The difference between autonomy and protection is so that our children can develop healthily in a way that we can continue to protect them from danger, without the need to suffocate, their growth.