Earlier this week, Red Bull launched Rise Till Dawn—an all-night Fortnite tournament in July starring local streaming sensation Tyler “Ninja” Blevins on the 99th floor of the Willis Tower. It’s no surprise that the event sold out in a few short minutes, Fortnite is arguably the breakout entertainment hit of 2018—played by 40 million people—and Ninja is the game’s biggest star.
WHO’s inclusion of gaming disorder in the ICD earned significant coverage from many major news outlets. The Associated Press’s story about it, for example, was the lead story on the Sun-Times’s website at one point, with a headline that read “Avid Gamer or Video Game Addict?”
Even though violence has been decreasing over the last two decades of the age of the video game, (and—no—we’re not all dead from Pokemon Go accidents) the concerns continue. A column published in the Observer on Monday, headlined “WHO’s Ruling on Video Game Addicts Could Help Prevent Mass Shootings,” repeats the argument that video games begat violence—despite the fact there is little evidence to back that up.
Kids and their technology that parents don’t quite understand are easy targets, but that doesn’t mean we should single them out as a bogeyman. The truth is—whether it’s shooting a virtual soldier or swiping right for a date—we’re all hunched over screens way too often these days.
