“That game! I want to kill its makers...”, say despairing parents as Fortnite takes over from schoolwork and revision. Can teachers help?  

It’s the game of survival that is gripping households across the land. On one handset, we have thousands of young people, aged between about 8 and 18, heavily into a free online video game called Fortnite: Battle Royale. After parachuting down onto a virtual island of a hundred combatants, they work with friends online to be the last team standing. And then they do it all again. And again. And again.   

Meanwhile, still clinging desperately to another set of controls are the parents. Their mission is simply to try to rid their home of that video game - or at least to drive it into a small corner so that they can reclaim that domestic territory for more productive use, such as offspring’s long-promised pre-exam “surge”.

The power struggle in Fortnite is fairly comic-book and trifling compared to the real “battle royale” that ensues each time a parent intervenes in the proceedings and delivers the time-honoured “you’ve spent too long on that now. Time to stop.” 

Fortnite mission

There are a few parents who claim that they have never had to step in. “We just put the timer on and when the time’s up they come off. What’s all the fuss about?” reports one proud parent.  But it’s a complete Fortnitemare for most others. One despairing father has blogged: “As Fortnite is the source of virtually all arguments at home I would happily round up the game’s developers and drop them onto an island, hunt them down and execute each of them.”

That measure might sound a little extreme, but the parental exasperation is understandable, particularly for those housing a GCSE or A-level candidate. While all students should have time off from the pressures of exam world, Fortnite often means that there is no “time on” for there to be a “time off”. 

What can we teachers do to help the parents of Fortnite-fixated exam students?  Not much, probably, but maybe - if we’re not already doing this - we could try giving parents more leverage at home by setting our exam students some extra homework tasks. One simple thing is to redefine revision as “homework” too,  giving students a weekly list of revision topics to prepare notes on - for parents to monitor. It’s not much - and risibly irrelevant for many, I know - but it may help steer some Fortniters in the right direction and would also give parents more detailed and substantial reasons for shutting the island down and bringing the resident GCSE paratrooper back to reality.   

Teacher teamwork

A more devious strategy is for us to start making more use of Fortnite in our lessons.  If there’s one way of accelerating the decline of anything popular it is for teachers to start claiming ownership. Better still, a global agreement to deliver tedious, Fortnite-themed school assemblies on the value of “teamwork” could easily kill the game off completely.   

There is also a tiny indication that the game may already be past its peak. Admittedly, this suggestion is entirely based on our own Fortnite-focused son suddenly opting instead for a game of Backgammon with his sister a couple of nights ago. All right, so he was soon parachuting back down to that island, but it felt like a landmark moment. In the great battle royale, it may “not be the end, but it may be the beginning of the end”.

Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire

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