PassW0rd – 31st October 2018 (Fortnite)

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM.

Speaker B: If you like what you hear and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm. Hello and welcome to Password. I’m Peter Warren, and this month we’re talking about Fortnite, as indeed are many other people. And of course, the burning question now is, is this popular computer game dangerous? Addictive, antisocial, and a menace. Or is that just another moral panic whipped up by the nanny state and its backers in the sort of newspapers that geriatric gentlefolk like to read? The former technology editor of The Guardian, Charles Arthur, plays the game with his teenage sons and is ready to defend Fortnite to the death. Obviously, that’s going to be a non-gory death that provides a shaft of light to whisk you up to heaven, as it does in the game.

Speaker C: It’s a truly clever game, the way that it’s social. Now, if I describe how it works, it might not sound like that. So it’s based on the Japanese film Battle Royale, which was dumping a whole lot of 100 kids on an island, and they all have to kill each other until only one survives. That was turned into the film Hunger Games, of course, very famous with Jennifer Lawrence. And it’s basically the format for Fortnite. And what happens is that Indeed, you can play in the 100 single-player version, or you can play a social version, which is 25 groups of 4. So you choose who the 4 people are, and if you can’t get 4 people together, then the game will just assign you. Or you can play 50 versus 50, which is something more of a melee and fairly messy in many ways, but it’s much more social than people think. It’s not isolating at all because the way that Fortnite works, people can talk to each other as they’re playing. And it’s not gory. If you actually watch what happens when someone’s killed, they’re sort of taken up to heaven, I guess it is, in in a sort of ray of bright light, but there isn’t sort of gore and blood spatter or anything like that. It’s really not trying to make anything out of the gore. And the mechanics of it are fascinating. It has a sort of element of Minecraft and it builds to sort of enthrall the player. And at the same time, it’s not something which tries to take money off people. You’re able to play it for free. You don’t have to spend any money to get better. You can’t buy better weapons. You can’t buy better anything. All you can buy is costumes, which they call skins. That’s literally the only thing you can buy. And it doesn’t do it doesn’t do you any good to have a skin that costs more money than anyone else. It’s actually like fashion in that sense.

Speaker B: Right, so you’re just basically a very well-dressed person in the game killing somebody.

Speaker C: That’s basically it. It literally is like that. You know, there are skins which become available only very briefly and only for a sort of short period of time. At the moment, one which is very popular— I mean, we’re speaking in October, early October, and Fortnite first started to get popular around about this time last year, so 2017, and there was very briefly then a Halloween costume. And now that Halloween is approaching again, people who have that skin are sort of showing it off because you can’t get it now, although it may become available. So they’re sort of showing it off while it’s still got rarity value. It really is just like fashion, people sort of showing off that they’ve got catwalk fashion or something.

Speaker B: So what’s the reason then for this reaction to this? Is it this old thing of parents not liking the children sitting in front of a screen and wanting them to go out and play in the fields or go out and get some fresh air? Is it just that, that you think that somebody sitting on a sofa doing nothing is not good for them?

Speaker C: There is a sort of generational difference where many of the parents, the older parents, obviously would have grown up— when they were growing up as kids, there was no internet for them. They had TV. They might have spent hours watching TV and been shooed out of the house by their parents to go and do things. Nowadays, rather than watching TV, kids are playing games on game consoles. That’s sort of how these things have changed. But there’s a sort of moral panic which comes around every few years or so. You just need to get a cohort of parents who grow up who haven’t sort of experienced a huge banner game rather like this, who’ve forgotten, for example, the last time that it came around, which was Grand Theft Auto. Probably Grand Theft Auto 4 was the big one that everyone got very upset about because it seemed to be encouraging people to steal cars, though I don’t think the incidence of car theft by teenagers went up or down as a result of GTA. And obviously you need media news desks which see a great sort of moral panic which they can get all very excited about and which can therefore incentivize their readers to get upset about.

Speaker B: Do you think this is just a sort of a middle-class response? I mean, there used to be something on the BBC which said, it was a program called Let’s Turn the TV Off and Do Something Else Instead. Instead? Do you think it’s that sort of middle-class reaction to something?

Speaker C: It’s not just a middle-class reaction. I mean, it’s, you know, sort of up and down the social scale. You can find people on the States who say, “I wish the kids weren’t sitting inside playing games.” But the reality is that you have to find something that will interest them more than being inside. You know, if you want kids to stop playing games, you have to offer them something to do which is more interesting, more enthralling, which they will find more attractive to do than playing games. And of course, you know, the advantage that the games designers have is that they can really work on making these things addictive. But, you know, nothing lasts forever. I mean, there are some signs maybe that Fortnite might not be able to survive forever. I mean, you know, what sort of odds are there on it being the biggest game in 5 years from now? I’d say they’re pretty slim.

Speaker B: Okay, but you said newsdesk. It’s not just the newsdesk, is it? We’ve had something very unusual. Matt Hancock, now the Health Minister, but was Digital Culture, Media and Sports Health Secretary. He said that there is a need for some of these large organizations, some of these large companies, to start being a lot more socially responsible about the amount of time they soak up from children.

Speaker C: I think it’s interesting what Matt Hancock is saying here, but it’s not particularly directed only at Fortnite or indeed the, the other games companies. I mean, he’s generally talking about the amount of time that kids spend on screens, and I think I would agree with him that time spent on the internet is not necessarily productive, and it’s very easy to wander off into rabbit holes on Facebook or on YouTube or whatever, which aren’t actually getting you any more useful information, aren’t making you more adept at any sort of skill, and are really just sucking up your time. So in that respect, I think that what he’s looking for there is sensible, and it’s interesting to see that both Apple and Google— Apple with its iPhone software, the latest version of iOS has a thing called Screen Time which shows you how much time you’ve been spending in the past week on various sorts of things such as social media or productivity apps, it will give you a report every week. Google’s Android, the latest version which is slowly rolling out to people, does much the same sort of thing. So the tech companies are aware that people are spending a long time on their things, and they’re sort of a bit conscious that they need to at least show willing to do it. But of course, in some cases, it’s not in their interest. For Facebook and Google, because they’re funded by advertising, they actually want people to spend more time on them all the time.

Speaker B: Okay, game on. Let battle royale commence. Suffolk Village Primary School head of school Hannah Gant believes Fortnite is transforming the lives of children in her school, even though none of them is old enough officially to play it. And that’s not just a teacher being old-fashioned and tutting about children having fun online. Mrs. Gant told Password’s gaming editor Brad Davis that many parents are also worried about the changes in children’s behaviour that the game is causing.

Speaker D: Although all our laptops and iPads in school have got age restrictions, they cannot access any of those sites. We are very aware that they are accessing them at home, which we obviously have no control over.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker D: So I know that quite a few of the staff have mentioned before games as Fortnite, Call of Duty, all these games that obviously are quite violent and they’re not for children in our school, they are being discussed around the school because that’s what they’re playing at home.

Speaker E: Okay, and we’re talking games then, well Fortnite, an age rating of about 12, Call of Duty I believe is about 16 if I’m wrong there.

Speaker D: Yeah, it’s a 15 or a 16 game.

Speaker E: And you’re having children as young as that constantly talking about it going home?

Speaker D: Absolutely, yeah, and sometimes it can be the children themselves playing it Other times they’re just witnessing older siblings play the game, but obviously that language is there and the terminology is there that they shouldn’t be witnessing.

Speaker E: So yeah, as we discussed a little bit earlier, your kids are turning around and saying, um, oh, I was a great sniper, I was hidden for ages, got him.

Speaker D: I got a headshot and I got this, and it’s just language that years ago you didn’t hear. Now you’re hearing it in everyday language, and it’s often you can see what they’re playing at home comes across in the playground. Because obviously children will reenact what they’re playing.

Speaker E: Yes.

Speaker D: And often it will be someone’s hiding, they’re the sniper, someone else will say, “Ah, I got a headshot on you!” And it’s just not language that we’ve heard before.

Speaker E: At schools, how do you control it yourselves at the school level?

Speaker D: We run lots of e-safety, internet safety days for the children. We have a red button on all our computers that say report if the child’s feeling vulnerable in any way or they see something that they know they shouldn’t see.

Speaker F: Okay.

Speaker D: So we have all of those on our computers. They are age-restricted anyway, but obviously we are aware that they’re playing them at home. So recently we sent out actually an email and text to all parents just to remind them of certain games that we’re aware are being talked about in school and they are obviously an age 12 or 15 and should not be played at home. Now it’s up to the parents to make that decision, but we can only inform them that actually there is an age restriction for a reason. So, and in assemblies when we’ve discussed things with the children, we always mention online safety and the fact that a lot of video games are not suitable for a very good reason.

Speaker E: Have you noticed at schools, um, you actually say terminology and that’s changed, have you noticed, um, children’s behaviour in general changing, being a bit more aggressive?

Speaker D: I think I think so. I think that a lot of the time the games that they play were probably like cops and robbers years ago, and that’s fine. It’s just a different take on it. I think what’s more worrying is that when they leave school, instead of saying I’m going around someone’s for tea or for a playdate, it’s I’ll meet you online later. And that seems to be the way that they socialise now. It’s not going out and playing, it’s not riding your bike, it’s I’ll meet you online, and that’s how they talk. I think there’s always been an argument ever since, you know, technology has become what it has. Some will argue and say actually it’s brilliant, it’s beneficial, there’s so many positives, whereas others are always going to have the attitude of actually they need to be out and about, they need to be playing. Although that can bring its own risks and dangers itself, being online, you, I think, as a teacher are very aware of the fact that perhaps not all parents know what their children are doing online. So I think it, I think it does bring a worry to teachers and anyone who works with children really.

Speaker E: Before Fortnite came along, were you seeing any kind of signs of this kind of behaviour in children? Does seem to have really spiked off around Fortnite. Yeah, would you say Pokémon Go had some kind of similar effects?

Speaker D: No, I think Fortnite has been a you know, obviously quite a big hit with the children. So I think that for the past probably 5 or 6 years, there’s always been something there that would trigger a little worry in your mind of what the children are playing. But Fortnite seems to have taken over quite dramatically.

Speaker G: Yes, um, in that sense, with the children emulating the dance moves.

Speaker D: And absolutely, yeah. And you’ve even, you know, you see it on TV even. You’ve got these big celebrities that the children will know. Yes, they’re imitating the dance Smoothes. It’s become this massive craze that not everyone appreciates, but obviously the children know, and the children idolize some of these people. So you can’t— in some ways you can only think the children are normal for getting on top of this craze, because it would be weird if they didn’t. It’s like the fidget spinners.

Speaker E: Yes.

Speaker D: So the children are almost innocent in all of this.

Speaker E: So you think a lot of it’s to do with peer pressure as well? At the end of the day, a lot of children are playing it, so their friends have got to get on board.

Speaker D: Yeah, and I think if you look at it, if fewer children are going out and calling for friends and playing with them and they’re all meeting up online, if you’re one of those children who isn’t playing Fortnite or another game, then how are you socially going to mix anymore?

Speaker E: Yes.

Speaker D: You can’t. No one’s going out, no one wants to play, they’re all online. So if you want to be part of that, you have to be able to play the games with them.

Speaker E: And I suppose, and I am just assuming here, but as a parent that must make you feel a little bit powerless because you can’t turn around to to your child exactly saying, ‘No, you can’t do whatever all your friends are doing.’ Exactly. Tough on you. It’s a very hard thing to explain, isn’t it?

Speaker D: Yeah, that’s definitely— and we had had some parents actually coming to school and say, ‘I don’t want my child playing this game.’ Obviously the school have said, ‘We completely agree with you and support in their decision,’ but from the child’s point of view, he was being isolated out of school because he’s not allowed on them.

Speaker E: Yes.

Speaker D: So it was our job in school to try and get those connections going again, and we did lots of team building and orienteering games, and we went to forest schools to try and build those relationships up that I think were lost because of technology.

Speaker B: Hang on, I need a new skin here. It’s an academic cap and gown, and it glows in the dark and packs Wembley Stadium with thousands of fans. Enter esports lecturer Stuart Costas from the bachelor’s degree course that’s just started at Staffordshire University in Stoke-on-Trent. 60 universities or colleges provide 215 undergraduate and 40 master video game courses throughout the UK, and Staffordshire is the one with the most. On the university website, Costas appears as a game character. His superpower is determination. His favorite game, The Last of Them. This website’s built to look like a game, but it’s a serious academic program with professional placements, and you need A-level grades of 2 Bs and a C, or distinction merit in BTEC TEC to get onto the degree course. The next open day, if you’re interested, is on the 24th of November. Why would anyone want to study live events for video games? Surely they’re for fun, not for learning. Stuart Costas explains.

Speaker H: I’ll give you an example actually best on that. I’ve been an esports fan for a good, I’d say, 5 years now, and I was hooked from the second I went to a live event. But all my mates were playing it, and it’s only around the last 3 years that I suddenly thought esports is actually something I’d really love to get involved in. And this is the same thing on that for film students that I speak to as well, you know, that if they’ve got a passion for something, you know, you, you follow what you want to do. And I would say on that, that’s exactly what I would say to, you know, um, not only young people in the UK, because I don’t want to say it’s just for young people, it’s, you know, it’s for anyone with a passion. There’s quite a large variant of ages that are people that actually, you know, really love games but also love esports. But also, yes, you know, it’s— that’s what you want to do. You want to follow what you want to do in life. As a parent, tons of parents have come to us in the open days and said, you know, thank you, this is something that I’ve told my son or daughter especially on that to say, you know, here is something that you love, do what you want. But then they obviously ask, is it, you know, is it a creditable thing? Well, that’s a fair enough question, and the answer with the facts that we’ve given them is yes. Esports is a growing industry and it’s successful, and it will keep growing as long as they’re on that, that people, you know, love what they do and the community supports that. And that’s what esports behind the scenes really is. It’s the It’s the passion that’s involved. And just as anyone that makes a film or anyone that performs a quality piece of music, it’s the same thing. You do what you love. So I’d say to anyone in the UK that’s interested in this, if you’re interested in esports and you would like to get into the industry, then yes, I would say it is a viable career path because the opportunities are going to be created for you to study and you’ll get to master a skill and go into an industry that you, you’re really passionate about. But I would like to state as well, it’s not just for anyone in the UK, this is for anyone worldwide as well. We’ve had lots of interest on that from people from the West and people from the East, so it’s viable for anyone as long as, like any degree or any industry, that you’re passionate about what you want to do. And if you’re passionate about something, you’ll be successful.

Speaker B: In terms of career options, It is certainly true that some video games builders and events managers earn good money. The most lucrative careers are in playing. Sahil Arora is a professional Dota 2 player. By the age of 27, he’d won a total of $2,826,896 from 67 tournaments. Making an average prize value of $42,000, meaning he is the highest-earning gamer of all time. And the creative people who make the games can also win big. Sam and Dan Houser, the British brothers who gave us Grand Theft Auto, the car-stealing game, have been awarded most of a royalties payout of $538 million from Take-Two Interactive Software following a lawsuit. But the way the games industry works, it actually relies on the talent and creativity of amateur gamers who make modifications or mods to their favorite games on the open source development platforms. Some experts call this exploitation, child labor, or in that wonderful jargon of the internet and technology playboy. The mods definitely improve the games and enable the manufacturers to build new versions and make more profits. Should some of those profits go back to the young gamers who had the idea, or is that just part of the fun? Fortnite is so good that even long-established games such as Call of Duty are rushing out imitations of its format. According to Wired magazine, the addition of a battle royale mode in the newest Call of Duty serves two masters with a single ploy: filling the telltale gap left by the series’ absentee single-player campaign while chasing one of gaming’s biggest trends. It powerfully communicates, via reference and self-pastiche, the way the series has and hasn’t changed. I was disappointed when Black Ops 4 was announced not to have a single-player campaign, and I still am, but this might be the most honest Call of Duty ever made. Ironic that the most honest game is called Black Ops. Perhaps, since that’s the military code word for fake news and propaganda. And that will be the subject of our next Password show on the 8th of November. Honestly. This is Password with me, Peter Warren, on Resonance FM, and after this you can hear DJ Ritu with A World in Your Ear. Duty means something different for civilians of course. The Daily Telegraph has a campaign called Duty of Care. They insist that technology companies need to be more responsible since they appear to be using their apps to drive more engagement with young people. Facebook, for example, have now agreed to stop sending notifications, reminders, or alerts in the middle of the night when the children are asleep because they’ve been getting up and answering their phones. Some children stay up late playing Fortnite, and some parents have told us that they feel that the technology is intruding into their children’s lives. Professor Anna Marmadouro is the chair of metaphysics at Durham University, and she’s made a special study of how technology can help us to control our lives. Professor Marmadouro, the duty of care, It’s an issue, isn’t it?

Speaker I: Absolutely. I mean, I’m glad that you brought it up because I’m a philosopher, so obviously I do think about these kind of questions. You know, I think about what’s good or bad. Words like duty and care are very familiar to me. So indeed, I mean, if there is any issue we should concentrate on now, it’s educating especially the younger generation to handle the opportunities that technology makes available to us in a better way. Of course, it’s not only about the younger generation. We need to educate their parents. We need to educate the grandparents because the grandparents Parents are that section of society that in a way is more needy of the support that technology can give us. So in other words, having great technology available to us should not be equivocated with the idea that we give away control of our life to something else, and also should not be understood as, oh, we just use technology, no criteria needed. Not at all. And it’s a great time for philosophers in and other categories of people such as psychologists and so on to study how we can make best use of technology now that technology has so much to offer to us.

Speaker B: Another professor, clinical psychiatrist Naomi Feinberg of the University of Hertfordshire, has joined a global network of neuroscientists, psychologists, and educationalists. They aim to communicate the evidence to policymakers and governments that some aspects of technology— the internet, online gambling, social media, and gaming— can be harmful, particularly watching box sets, so that the public health initiatives are informed by the best scientific evidence and can advise us accordingly. Professor Feinberg has been telling me what sorts of harm obsessive gaming can We know very little about it, but we think it’s important to learn more.

Speaker F: What we do know though is that some individuals are affected, for example, by internet gaming to such an extent that they are significantly functionally disabled by it. They’ve lost control over their ability to stop gaming. And in the case of young people, their academic grades and their social development is being affected to such an extent that the World Health Organization has just recognized gaming disorder as a mental disorder. So we know that there are harms associated with it. What we’re not so clear about is the extent of the harms. So how many people are affected by these disorders? And the cost and burden to society that they’re associated with. And then on the other hand, how best to intervene, either to identify at-risk individuals early and prevent them from getting hooked, or in the case of those people who are now coming forward to clinicians with these disorders, how to properly treat them.

Speaker B: So we basically— we don’t know numbers, but we know we’ve got an issue.

Speaker F: Exactly right.

Speaker B: Now, the internet has been around for what, since 1996 really? That was when the consumer, the real consumer rollout of it happened. Do you think that there’s some problems that are going to come down the line just because we’re only just seeing these manifested now? I mean, there’s 20 years of basically being online and beginning to change our behavior there, isn’t there?

Speaker F: So patterns of internet use and engagement are changing all the time. On the whole, the amount of engagement worldwide is increasing. The accessibility of internet-related activities is improving, so most people are now engaging via smartphones rather than PCs. So the amount of time that people are spending on the internet globally is increasing. It’s the interplay between what’s happening in society and the new online environment. We believe that the internet is simply a new environment by which some of these problems may get amplified. So to some extent, I, I agree with you. There are particular features of the internet, the unlimited almost unlimited information that you can get from it. It’s ready accessibility and availability. The fact that it is not a passive medium, but it will actively reinforce you back by sending you back, depending through machine learning algorithms that you’re very familiar with, will identify your individual preferences and send you back material that reinforces your engagement with it, all of these things make it a new environment that has great potential for addiction, just like many other useful substances or activities that we engage in. I think it’s this particular personalized reinforcing property of the internet that might make it rather more dangerous than we thought.

Speaker B: Can we just expand on them? Can you give me a little more detail? Because that’s the fascinating bit, isn’t it?

Speaker F: I think in terms of the disorders that we’re talking about, so if we think about gaming disorder, intermittent reinforcement— so sometimes rewarding performance in a particular way, but not always. So you’re not always assured of a win when you’ve performed a winning activity, and also constantly giving you your ranking on a particular game, feeding back that information, is thought to be actually potently reinforcing and will encourage the player to keep playing. And it’s features such as this that may be inbuilt into some of these activities that is giving rise to certain people with these predilections for getting hooked, losing control.

Speaker B: And that seems to be the interesting word, doesn’t it? Control. Because you’re talking about a world where people are in control. We seem to be talking about a world where people are in control. If you go out into the real world, you’re not in control to that same extent. You don’t get that pointing information back. You don’t get that reinforcement. So in a sense, the internet is a wonderful safe place for people.

Speaker F: People may feel an illusory sense of control, and as you say, that may be one of the attractions of engagement in the virtual world, which of course is in a sense an illusion. If you can’t control logging on and logging off, and as a result of which your social relationships, your family relationships, your interpersonal, your personal intimate relationships suffer, your work suffers, productivity suffers, your grades, academic grades suffer. There’s an interesting piece of research from Canada looking at a large number of Canadian undergraduates and asking them if they were having any problems with controlling their access to the internet and what their problems were. The commonest problem reported by the Canadian undergraduates was difficulty disconnecting from video streaming, looking at Netflix, box sets of things that once they’d started, they just couldn’t stop. And when they looked at the grade points of these students, the grades with those who were claiming that they were suffering, their grades were poorer as well. So, you know, there’s some evidence building that even innocuous activities activities that most of us would think are totally socially acceptable, such as watching box sets of TV programmes one after another, may have an addictive or compulsive effect on people that adversely affects other aspects of their life. And some people recognize it. It may be that— I think children and young people are most prone because they may not have the insight and the judgment that adults have to recognize how far hooked they’ve become.

Speaker B: That’s the point. One of the things that the social media companies are beginning to do is to turn off the social media alerts for young people based on their demographic.

Speaker F: Well, I, I think in these digital feedback activities, there are opportunities, positive opportunities for the internet providers, the, the platforms, platforms to potentially identify people who are engaging in the internet in a problematic way through their digital fingerprints and helping that person recognize and disconnect from the internet. And that would be an avenue of research I think would be very fruitful to explore, but it would require the cooperation of industry.

Speaker B: As we’ve heard, gaming has many critics, from Naomi Feinberg and head of school Hannah Gant to Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary. He used to be the Digital Sports and Culture Secretary, and before that, the Digital Minister, so he knows better than most how important digital games are to the UK economy. Globally, the industry is worth $84.656 billion. It’s more important than films, and more than 2,600 companies are involved in making and distributing games and esports. And as we’ve seen, there is now a crossover developing between the sports and football, with many football players performing some of the dances that we’ve seen in Fortnite.

Speaker F: Night.

Speaker B: According to the industry body UKIE, the Association for Interactive Entertainment, Britain is the fifth largest market in the world for video games and growing rapidly. With so much at stake, psychologists like Naomi Feinberg believe that games manufacturers are deliberately trying to stoke up the demand for games by building in addictive attributes. Can this be true? I’ve been talking to James Duffy, who writes scenarios for computer games at Silicon Studio in Tokyo. James feels no need to apologize for making computer games that are compelling and utterly absorbing.

Speaker G: Imagine if I’m writing a book, a novel, a story with characters, someone arguing that books books are corrupting the youth of the nation, which is what people have said about books over the years. You hear it surprisingly less these days. But someone, they would say, well, look at this. He’s deliberately made this exciting thing happen at the end of a chapter just so you keep reading to the next page. Look at this. He’s deliberately created interesting, compelling characters and put in plot twists that keep you engaged. What would What would the alternative be? It would be to write a very boring novel, a deliberately boring novel that had as little value as possible to the whole world. I mean, and if the BBC took that approach with their website, they’d be going, “You know what? Let’s make our website, let’s design our website so it’s less addictive.” What would that amount to? It would mean stories would be harder to find. It would mean, I mean, if you If you took this to its logical extreme, it would be meaningless, right? You’d have no website at all.

Speaker B: Is that—

Speaker G: maybe that’s the answer. Maybe I’m just making an absurd slippery slope argument here. But what if the real alternative to this is stop cynically making these websites so easy to use, stop cynically making these video games so fun, just make boring video games. Well, why make a video game at all? There goes the video game industry, there goes video games. Why have websites? Why have news? Why have books? Why make anything?

Speaker B: He says people shouldn’t criticize what they don’t understand.

Speaker G: The thing is that maybe a lot of people who don’t play games don’t really imagine is that there are lots of different kinds of games, and by that I mean there are games that resemble games in the traditional sense, that you play over and over and over again in the same way that you have infinite numbers of chess games, or you can play tennis over and over again and get better at it, and every game is different, and they’re like loops that go around in circles. And that’s where we have the term video game or computer game, because the earliest games have always been like that. Fortnite is a game like that, and you play over and over and over again just as you would a sport or a board game. The kind of games that I’ve worked on are are actually closer in form to something like a film, where they have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and they have a kind of guided, authored experience. So I’m working on a team of people who are maybe thinking about level design, mission design, where the player starts in the beginning of the game and the kind of adventure they go on. So they’re having to solve problems and overcome challenges, maybe solve puzzles or explore and find objects or maybe fight enemies or maybe avoid enemies or something like that, but they’re sort of being led down an effectively more or less linear path. So games like the Uncharted series or games by Valve like Half-Life and Portal are famous examples of that kind of thing. Those are the kind of games I’ve sort of written for. Our objective there is to try to tell an interesting story and make a game that’s fun and engaging, because the games, the projects, involve a lot of different disciplines. You have writers, people like me. I’ve written stuff that looks like film scripts. They’ve got characters talking. They’re slightly different from films because they have to incorporate a lot of different situations that the player could put themselves in. They have to branch in different ways depending on choices that the player makes, but they’re still kind of structured more or less kind of like film scripts, like I said, with the beginning, middle, and end. But you also have obviously technical people, programmers, you have sound people, you have people doing music, you have actors who are reading the lines if you have speaking characters in the games, you have all kinds of designers, you have huge amounts of artists, they involve huge amounts of different people, and the object is just what you’d expect it to be, something that’s fun. A lot of huge big-budget games now, like for example, I mentioned the Uncharted Uncharted series or The Last of Us or the recent God of War games, they are trying to make something that’s entertaining in the same way that a blockbuster movie might be entertaining, that has a story and characters that you care about. That will be part of the appeal of those sorts of games. A game like Fortnite, I have to be careful here because I don’t know it very well at all, but my understanding is that it does have writing, it does have sort of voices, I think. Characters say stuff, but they’re just more kind of flavor in the game as you’re playing it. They’re sort of fun things. I don’t believe it has a structured narrative in that same sort of sense of the kind of stuff I’ve worked on.

Speaker B: People deliberately make games addictive, do they?

Speaker G: That’s a difficult question. I think that in many ways the answer is yes, in the same way that, like I said before, there’s a whole spectrum of games out there. There are tiny, cheap little games that you can play on your phone that require very little in the way of advanced graphics or anything like this, and they’re effectively just sort of gambling games in a sense. And they use many of the same tricks and design tricks to reward players and keep them playing more in short bursts and being addicted to it, that like fruit machines or gambling, gambling kind of computer games you get in pubs and stuff will use many of the same tricks. So there is a sort of dark art there to certain kinds of games, I suppose. With a game like Fortnite, I don’t think it’s a sort of sinister organization trying to seduce and entrap as many players as possible. They’re just an entertainment company trying to make an entertainment product.

Speaker B: It’s apparently meant to be similar to The Hunger Games or something, isn’t it, where people are meant to be themselves in a sense and having to fight lots and lots of other people who are also in the game. So in a sense, you are yourself, I suppose.

Speaker G: Well, it’s like The Hunger Games in that the scenario, the premise from The Hunger Games— I mean, a lot of people liken The Hunger Games to the Japanese movie Battle Royale, and because the premise is that you’re placed in a sort of random location and have to fight to the death, which is the same premise premise of the Hunger Games books and Hunger Games films. That genre of video games that Fortnite belongs to is actually called— like, the genre is called battle royale because it’s similar to the original Japanese movie. Insofar as this question about being yourself, I think that’s a little bit of a— I think that’s— it’s not quite the right way to think about it. I think that a lot of people who aren’t so into games kind of imagine that people are being— they’re somehow injecting themselves into virtual worlds like the movie Ready Player One. I don’t think games are quite there yet, and I don’t really think that’s the appeal for people who— I don’t know, maybe I’m just only speaking for myself here, but you create a character in Player One that you run around in, and it’s this crazy sort of cartoonish world. It’s not exactly a hyper-realistic, super violent nasty thing. It’s a sort of crazy cartoonish, bright, colorful, sort of silly world, and you create these cartoonish kind of characters that run around fighting each other.

Speaker B: One of the things that people have been saying, I mean, for example, Matt Hancock, who is now the Health Secretary, when he was the Digital, Culture, Media and Sports Secretary, he said that the manufacturers of social media companies and the games manufacturers needed to— I mean, he was in a sense the one who said that there was this need for some duty of care. He was saying, or inferring, that people deliberately make games addictive. Do they?

Speaker G: That’s a difficult question. I think that in many ways the answer is yes, in the same way that— I mean, that like I said before, there’s a whole spectrum of games out there. There are tiny, cheap little games that you can play on your phone that require very little in the way of advanced graphics or anything like this, and they’re effectively just sort of gambling games in a sense. And they use many of the same tricks and design tricks to reward players and keep them playing more in short bursts and being addicted to it, like fruit machines or gambling kind of computer games you get in pubs and stuff will use many of the same tricks. So there is a sort of dark art there to certain different kinds of games, I suppose. With a game like Fortnite, I don’t think it’s a sort of sinister organization trying to seduce and entrap as many players as possible. They’re just an entertainment company trying to make an entertainment product like any other entertainment company out there. I think if you were to say, yes, we’re trying to make it addictive, I mean, they would— I have, I’ve enjoyed loads of games over the years, some of them probably a bit more than I should have And they’re addictive in the sense that they’re fun. But I’m cautious here because this is smelling like a moral panic, isn’t it?

Speaker B: Moral panic? No, actually. Addiction to gaming really does exist. It’s caused by the rush of dopamine to the brain that you get from gratifications like winning through to the next level. The World Health Organization earlier this year officially declared gaming addiction to be a disease, and this classification means that eventually addicts in Britain might be able to get treated for free on the National Health Service. NHS spokesperson Jeremy Dunning told Password there is a possibility that a pilot project might start late in 2019, but that the evidential basis for gaming addiction information and how to treat it is not yet there. In Spain, Seth Bolton works with recovering technology addicts, including those who got hooked on gaming. He’s been telling Password’s Jane Wyatt about how to recognise that there’s a problem.

Speaker A: The kind of signs and symptoms are pretty similar to the warning signs of any addiction in cases of kind of online addiction. It would include kind of playing the game to escape difficult situations or feelings. Withdrawing from life by not taking part in healthy activities that you’re used to, quitting the football team to play longer, for example. And in the case of adolescents, poor performance at school or at work, poor self-care, skipping meals or showers to play longer, weight gain or weight loss. And I think psychologically, you know, the symptoms are very similar to any addiction: a sense of isolation, disconnection, and loneliness, mood swings and irritability, and low mood and anxiety. And while I haven’t come across anyone directly kind of addicted, if you will, to Fortnite, I’ve certainly come across people with compulsive issues around online gaming. And I guess it’s going to be the same kind of thing with a game like Fortnite.

Speaker F: So what can be done about this?

Speaker A: The way treatment would work, for example, at our clinic in Spain, Step 1 Recovery, there’d be 3 main stages to recovery. The first would be to include kind of bringing back a structure to the day. That doesn’t revolve around gaming, along with education on addiction and crucially getting the person to see that they do have an addiction problem. They’re not weak or bad people, but there is some behavioural stuff going on here that needs to be addressed. And the second stage, the kind of addiction treatment method we would favour would be cognitive and behavioural therapy to address where the addictive thinking comes from and shifts their compulsive thinking patterns around gaming to healthier ones and build up a kind of frustration tolerance to cravings, along with looking at some of the underlying unhealthy core beliefs that contribute to addiction. Because there’s often kind of unhealthy demanding beliefs about reality and oneself and the world— I’m useless, I need to escape— that are kind of perpetuating this want to escape into a fantasy land. And after a few months of normal functioning, some of the compulsive thinking would start to shift. So the third stage would be to look at a relapse prevention plan, because there’s always a chance of relapse with any addiction. So that would include addressing high-risk situations and triggers, and also linking in with ongoing support groups such as Online Gamers Anonymous, as it’s kind of statistically proven that people who continue to attend these kind of support groups and fellowships have much more likelihood of sustaining long-term recovery, whether that be from alcohol, drugs, online gaming, whatever it may be.

Speaker F: I suppose with something like drugs and alcohol, then you would try to achieve a total ban. I know a little bit about Alcoholics Anonymous.

Speaker I: They try to prevent relapsing by just not drinking.

Speaker F: Would that work for gaming too?

Speaker A: Yes, by total abstinence. Yeah. I mean, the difference with a drug or alcohol is you’re putting something in your body which the body becomes kind of, to use Alcoholics Anonymous terminology, kind of allergic to. There’s a real different reaction to that chemical. So you use compulsively even if there’s been a long break without that substance. But with a behavioral addiction, you know, something like CBT could help modify the behavior and bring back kind of normal functioning around it. So it may be that an individual could down the line healthily enjoy controlled use of video games again. However, it would be something that they’d really need to watch out for, and there would have to be a good relapse prevention plan in place. To address any issues if they did start using compulsively again. And that’s a slight difference in that there’s no actual substance involved, so that physiological compulsion isn’t, isn’t present in quite the same way. So it’s not necessarily that total and utter abstinence from all technology would be required, but it’s certainly caution and a relapse prevention plan if things did start slipping and sliding again.

Speaker F: The symptoms you mentioned earlier are actually quite common symptoms of adolescence anyway.

Speaker A: Whether or not they play games.

Speaker F: How would you be able to spot that compulsive gaming was causing these symptoms?

Speaker A: I mean, I think it would be significant marked changes in behaviour. Like if you have a kid who, for example, is outgoing, likes being on the football team, and then suddenly is drifting away from these things, and their behaviour is kind of slipping and sliding. And as you say, I agree with you that, you know, a lot of adolescents are like this anyway, but if there’s a marked change in behaviour around games and a sort of withdrawal and isolation from social situations, and it’s come in tandem with an increase in this kind of gaming, then it could be something to address. I mean, it’s something that’s not— something we shouldn’t be hysterical about. Serious addiction to these kind of games, I think, is in the minority of users, but I do believe it exists. So if there’s a marked change in behaviour around video games, then it’s something worth addressing.

Speaker F: Some parents and teachers that we’ve been talking to are also worried that children are starting to play these games, especially Fortnite, when they’re too young. Not only just too young for what it says on the box, but really too young to handle it.

Speaker A: Yes, and I think certainly— I wouldn’t know much about the censorship of these games, but certainly the younger, younger children are likely to become more compulsively involved with video games, you know. And I think there’s certainly a correlation to children who have different learning styles like dyslexia and ADHD that may be slightly more impulsive and maybe slightly more troubled at school and maybe have self-esteem issues who are looking to kind of validate themselves, and they’re given a sense of reward and gratification from games that perhaps they’re not getting at school and perhaps they’re not feeling elsewhere in their lives. So I think the development of addiction to these games can start quite young.

Speaker B: Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, is known as a talking cure, and talking can also be a form of prevention too. In the Finnish capital Helsinki, Paula Alsufi is practicing what she preaches about limiting children’s access to online games. In her own family, using her company’s own product, F-Secure’s Family Rules.

Speaker I: The idea behind is that our goal was really to make the Family Rules clear and understandable for both the child and the parents. I mean, we really want to feel that for the parents to feel that establishing rules online is a simple thing to do. And the Family Rules help families stay safe online. And enabling parents setting limits on screen time, filtering this unwanted content per age group, and locate their kids’ devices remotely so they can really guide their children online from anywhere. For example, you could fix the settings from your work when your child is at home as well. Kids will always find a way around overly strict boundaries, and the key is really for parents and children to work together so the child is an active participant in the decision-making on where limits should be set and understand why limits are needed. And this is something that we also guide in our software when you are installing and taking the steps, that we really encourage also the parents to do it together with the child and talk about it and do it as a joint decision for the whole family on setting these family rules together.

Speaker F: And how is it actually experienced in practice, if a child tries to stay up late playing on a smartphone under the bedclothes, what will happen?

Speaker I: I mean, if you set a time limit for your child, for example, for my daughter, we set up a 30-minute time limit per day. When that 30 minutes is up, you simply cannot access any of your apps. So if she starts to push one of her gaming apps, then it will just say, give you a notification and say, hey, your time limit is time is up for today, you will have some more time tomorrow, or you can ask your parents for more time. But that’s a notification she will get when she will try to use it when it’s her time to go to bed or the time limit is up. And have you tried it out in your own family?

Speaker F: What’s been the reaction?

Speaker I: Yes, I have tried it out, and my daughter was first. Of course, she started negotiating about the time limit, time, what would be appropriate for the day. And we started off when she was saying 1 hour would be a good time for her to play, and then I was going, maybe half an hour would be better. So then I was explaining also why it’s not good for her to spend too much time, and you get tired and unconcentrated and so on, and you do your homework, and then you have more time for your friends as well. And then she was seeing the side also that Okay, then I think half an hour is a good time to limit the gaming for the day.

Speaker B: Paula Alfsufi from F-Secure’s Family Rules. Other products are available if you want to technically block your children’s access to games. They can even save you from yourself if you feel it’s becoming a problem and if you want to get a life. But addiction is not the only worry for parents of children and teenagers in these technologically troubled times. There are other risks hiding in our consoles and laptops. There are the terrors of the darknet and cyberbullying, and there are also more mundane risks, such as your children getting hold of the credit card details that you’ve left online by buying loot boxes and skins for them. Here’s Hannah Gant again, a senior teacher at Thorndon Primary School in Suffolk and a mum, on the issues that she and her colleagues think parents should think about.

Speaker D: I think it would be really good to see a lot of these companies that have made these games do a bit more work, perhaps even with schools, you know, even if they had a bit of an advertising campaign on actually how to stay safe on these games and why there’s an age restriction in place. You don’t often hear anything else after the game’s been produced, it’s then out there.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker D: So I think there could be a lot of work done. And perhaps educating us on how we can do this.

Speaker E: Yes, educating. And so would you say that you— are you opposed to the fact that the children have to sign into these legally binding agreements in the first place?

Speaker G: It’s—

Speaker E: yeah, do you believe that should be legal at all?

Speaker D: Yeah, I think, to be honest, I think they’re kind of void, aren’t they? It’s pointless.

Speaker E: It is pretty pointless.

Speaker D: It’s absolutely pointless doing it. So, you know, they maybe could think of a better way of setting up an agreement maybe a child-friendly version with a few things that they’re going to agree to do, but they, they could do the adult version and perhaps they need to be— I don’t know how they’d do this— but do it so that actually the parent reads that bit and says they’re happy with it, and they go through it with the child and read that. But adult legal information is going to go way over the children’s heads.

Speaker E: So you do believe that if the adults— okay, yeah, can we say then that if the adults are going to let children play these games, they should be reading you know, the documentation.

Speaker D: Absolutely.

Speaker E: And then performing their, their tasks as guardians by then approving it at that point.

Speaker D: Definitely, I think so.

Speaker E: As a parent, Fortnite being a free game, of course it gets its money from somewhere, i.e., the microtransactions and the season passes that users and the such like.

Speaker I: Yes.

Speaker E: I’m guessing you’re bugged for money on a regular basis, are you?

Speaker D: Yes, definitely. Yeah, we have quite strict rule now that the children, if they want to buy anything from Fortnite, they have to save up their pocket money, okay, and they have to buy it because there’s these things called skins, and I think they’re £8 each time. And otherwise you’d be literally buying them and spending so much money every day. So, you know, and they’re— the, the game makers obviously are very clever because they’ll do like this new launch at 12 o’clock at midnight, but it will cost you this much to be part of it. And, you know, it’s a very good way of making making money, I just think that it’s, yeah, it’s not very fair on the children and the parents to constantly be asked for money when it’s meant to be a free game.

Speaker E: Would you instead ever switch back to the old way of, let’s say the game cost £50, but that was all you paid? £50, done, game over.

Speaker A: Yeah, I’d rather do that.

Speaker E: Here’s your game.

Speaker D: Definitely.

Speaker E: Off you go, Johnny, enjoy it.

Speaker D: Yeah, that’s it. I think so, because then it’s that one cost done and and you’re not then constantly nagged. I mean, I guess you could say it’s great as a bribe, you know, if they do really well in something, you’ll say, oh, I’ll buy you a skin. But it’s, it’s not great. It’s not the way it should be, is it?

Speaker E: No.

Speaker D: So no, I’d rather buy the game and then no more money.

Speaker E: Yeah, because then it cools down. I mean, you bribe them for that month, but then a month down the line, as you say, there’s a new skin, there’s a new skin maybe to coincide with Avengers or to coincide with this or coincide with that. Yes, I mean, there’s popular, everyone wants it.

Speaker D: They’re very clever in how they’re able to advertise and sell on that game, extremely clever. They’re very aware of what the children are into, they’re aware what’s popular, and they use it.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker D: And, you know, good for them, it’s great, it’s great for them, but it’s not so great for the parents that keep forking out money.

Speaker E: And again, you’re talking about here the skins, the dances, the internet culture that seems to leak through to the game, which all kids are on board with.

Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s a whole package, isn’t it?

Speaker B: That was Hannah Gant and some of the problems that computer games are beginning to throw up for families.

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