The Reckoning

It was time to face the ubiquity of Fortnite in our kids’ lives.

- Claude Brodesser-Akner

Amos and I were walking out of the gym after basketball practice last weekend when he saw a friend inside the lobby. He bolted to the window, rapped on the glass, and began performing a very particular dance. He put one hand—fingers in the shape of an L—to his forehead; his legs jutted back and forth like a dancing bear on a pendulum.

Puzzled, I watched. Then I pulled out my phone. “Siri, show me a dance with an L.”

“Whenever you feel me vibrating, that’s me doing the jitterbug,” answered Siri, as robotically unhelpful as ever. It was, of course, YouTube that provided the answer: “It’s ‘Take the L,’ from Fortnite.”

“But he doesn’t play Fortnite,” I mumbled in protest. If Siri had eyes she would have rolled them, and shot a knowing look at YouTube.

Although 250 million people play Fortnite, most of them tweens, I thought my family was like Brad Pitt’s in World War Z, standing behind the mighty walls of Jerusalem as the zombie hordes scratched and clawed at the sandstone walls below. Apparently, the zombies were over the wall.

A few months earlier, my wife and I had spent an anguished night exploring and debating the game. The kids made their pleas. Amos, the 8-year-old, explained that “the daily challenges reeeeally make you want to play it.” The kids at school are always talking about them, he said, and if you don’t know what they are, you’re not just not in on the joke—you’re a fraud. Ed, our oldest (these aren’t their real names), said he wanted to play because increasingly that was all that was happening at other kids’ houses. One recent afternoon, he said, two kids who had the game on their phones played each other, ignoring another who didn’t have Fortnite—or a phone.