Fortnite Summer
I don’t agree with all that Jordan Shapiro says in this piece, but at least it’s a different take on the growing Fortnite hatred that I admit to have felt at times this summer.
When I was 11, after a year of being yanked back and forth between New Jersey and Oklahoma and dealing with the breakup of my family, I spent most of the summer sitting in my carpeted bedroom playing a baseball boardgame called Longball, replaying the Yankees 1976 season. At some point my dad asked my sister what I’d been doing in the months since he saw me and she apparently alarmed him that I’d become so withdrawn that all I could do was sit around and play a baseball simulation game all summer.
I was annoyed at the time that my dad understood me so poorly — that if I’d had Longball a year or two earlier, I would have spent those earlier summers eagerly doing the exact same thing. And now, I’ve been in an online baseball league for 21 years that emulates much of what I did that summer, except with 27 other guys from the U.S. and Canada. It’s actually my strongest continuing connection to people over this timespan.
Maybe it all screwed me up hopelessly and I really should have been out in the 100+ degree Oklahoma heat all summer doing something that someone else thought I should be doing. (I’m not exactly sure what that is — acting like the characters in The Outsiders or Tex?) But I enjoyed the summer of 1977 in spite of some pretty heartbreaking change in my life and I’m pretty sure my kids enjoyed their far less dramatic one this year, grinding through Fortnite and Hearts of Iron IV for hours at a time. Sure, maybe if Mac had spent the hundreds of hours he spent becoming good at Fortnite learning the bass I bought him for his birthday he’d have a skill for life. But let’s not kid ourselves, that just wasn’t going to happen. And Finn may have become somewhat single minded via his summer obsession, but he now has a rather scary understanding of World War 2 and the geopolitics of the era. Maybe he’s a budding historian.
So everyone should relax and let kids be kids. They find their own interests and just because today’s pastimes are played on screens instead of sidewalks or cardboard doesn’t make them inherently more dangerous.
