Let’s all calm down about professional Fortnite coaching

Did you hear that parents are paying for coaching to help their children get better at Fortnite? That some of these human adults are also taking part in Fortnite lessons? Good Morning America is talking about it, and so is the Wall Street Journal. You are seemingly invited to have strong feelings about these stories, because it seems like everyone else does. It feels like at least some of them are meant to stoke that anger, but the targets don’t seem that deserving of the scorn.

And I’m a bit baffled, having thought about this particular controversy all morning. It’s hard to understand why people are so angry, and the argument against this practice isn’t being verbalized well by critics. Their complaints seem boil down to: paying someone to teach your kids how to play a video game is bad, because of course it is.

But why is it? Let’s all take a second to calm down and actually think about this.

What’s the downside, exactly?

Parents are goofy in general and tend to do goofy things for their children. I say that as a goofy parent with a lot of kids. Paying for coaches to help a child study mindfully and improve at something they enjoy isn’t that strange, in the grand scheme of things.

It seems like the only reason people are talking about Fortnite coaching at all is that they know we’ll click on Fortnite stories. There’s a strong incentive to recycle parenting stories that have played out across sports and games, like chess and even cheerleading, to focus on the hot new thing.

And yet, if you replaced Fortnite with private lessons for nearly any other activity, you would likely get a less emotionally charged response. You can get tutors in magic, you know. There’s no public outcry about parents who pay to help their kids get better at juggling.

There’s potential danger of overdoing it here, just like there’s danger in over-indulging any hobbies that parents decide should be taken seriously. But if parents are pushing children too hard to get better at something, the issue is the parent — not Fortnite, or chess, or juggling. The game is just a symptom of parental behavior that could be damaging to kids, no matter where the money is going. Parents paying for private clarinet lessons in the hope a kid is going to make it into a symphony are just as serious as the ones getting Fortnite coaches. They just can do it with less public ridicule.

As big as Fortnite is right now, it’s still just another video game to a large…