The summer of ‘Fortnite’ | Ap

If you have a tween or teen kid, or grandkid or nephew or neighbor or any young person remotely connected to you, you probably know what “Fortnite” is.

If you don’t know what it is, perhaps you’ve heard your kids discussing chug jugs, slurp juices, skins, and kills.

“Fortnite: Battle Royale” is a third-person shooter game in which players are dropped onto a previously-inhabited-but-now-apocalyptically-deserted island and fight other players to the death (although, happily, joining with their friends to do so). The violence is cartoonish compared with other similar games, and players get to build things like ramps and forts to assist their quest —which seems weird, but apparently enjoyable. My four boys, ages 9 to 15, love it.

As a parent, I can see the upside. My kids tell me they’re being “social.” I’m not so sure that sitting on a couch in your basement talking through a headset to your friend sitting on his couch in his basement is being social. But I’ll concede the point.

I do think the game crosses age-group categories in unique ways. I once walked into the room when my 9-year-old was playing with the 22-year-old brother of my 13-year-old’s friend. If the two of them were together in my living room, I don’t think they’d speak to each other, but “Fortnite” makes them playmates.

My boys also tell me they’re working on teamwork, because they’re not killing their friends, they’re working with their friends to kill other people. I’ll give them that one, too, because I’m feeling generous. (The other upside for parents: It adds a huge carrot to our bag of tricks. It’s amazing how quickly bathrooms get cleaned and lawns mowed when “Fortnite” is on the line.)

But I see a downside. My kids want to play it all the time. And when they’re not playing, they want to watch videos of other people playing. (I know this makes me earn the name “Old Man,” but I just can’t understand that.)

You can’t tell them to stop playing either; the game designers brilliantly structured the game so that players simply cannot stop in the middle of a round (at least that’s what my boys tell me). This has caused parents everywhere to learn how to disconnect their Wi-Fi, or unplug gaming devices and throw them across the room. But what concerns me most, partly as a parent, partly as a sociologist, is what they’re…