A Parents Guide to Fortnite

What parents need to know about Fortnite. What's going on? I'm Richdmiro. This is Rich on Tech Daily. Fortnite is one of the hottest video games out there and so many people are playing it. The full name is Fortnite Battle Royale, but everyone's pretty much just calling it Fortnite. The premise of the game be the last person standing. You're on an island with one hundred other people and you have to do what it takes to win, and yes, that means there are lots of weapons and killing involved.

Now.

Fortnite has been around on consoles for a while, like the Xbox and the PlayStation, but what really propelled this game to a new level of popularity is when it became available on the iPhone, and that was back in March. Recently, we talked to Josh oakesofsmartsocial dot com. He runs a really cool website that creates user guides for parents about popular apps so they basically better understand what their kids are doing on their phones.

And it's super popular because it's short gameplay, meaning that you can play for one minute to up to twenty minutes, and you're playing with one hundred other people. Many of them are your friends that you've invited to play with you, but you're playing for a short period of time. Think of it like episodic TV instead of a whole movie where it's a big commitment. Students like it because it's very fast paced.

Fortnite is free to download, but there are lots of opportunities to make in app purchases. We call this the freemium model. You can buy cooler outfits or better weapons. So one thousand v bucks as they call them, will cost you ten dollars. The other two most popular in app purchases are even more v bucks for twenty five dollars or sixty dollars, and the more you buy, the more bonus v bucks you get.

In this game, you can buy different outfits and all kinds of different things, and it's a little bit more silly than just some of the other games that are very graphic and violent. This game you can actually have fun, and you can dance, and you can wear silly outfits and do all kinds of things that your friends might laugh at, and you're having fun along the way.

The game is rated twelve's loss for frequent slash, intense, cartoon or fantasy violence and infrequent slash mild, medical slash treatment information, whatever that is.

So this game is for mature audiences because you're killing opponents in this game. Sure there's less blood and guts, but you have an ax or a machine gun and all kinds of different weapons that you're using to defeat the other ninety nine people that you could potentially be playing against.

So who are these ninety nine other people? Well, they could be your kids friends in real life, but they can also be strangers.

Apps like Fortnite and many other ones have what's called multiplayer mode. That means your kid can be chatting with people that you don't know. And the biggest problem with that some parents think, oh, there's a mute button, they can mute the person that they don't like that's said the bad word. Your kids might not know that. And you've also taught your kids to be polite, so if your kids are wanting to be polite, they may not mute that person because they don't want to seem rude.

And This is why Oaks recommends changing a privacy setting right when your kid first sets up their account.

That's why when you set up an account, your kids need to immediately set it to private so that only their friends can find them knowing a username or email, and not everybody can see them online.

And we're all guilty of this, spending too much time in front of our screens. It's just kind of the way of the world right now. Oaks recommends a simple solution.

Kids can lose track of time when they're on apps like Fortnite, and that's why we tell parents, go get a simple egg timer or a cooking timer and put it next to your kids so as they're playing, they can start to see and it'll buzz at the end of the game. Then parents aren't the bad person. The timer is. And it's a great way to say, oh, real life has elapsed in this amount of time, and now it's time for either to put this down or to do something different.

Now, I will tell you this. We started using these timers in our house a few months back and it has been amazing. We're a big fan of them. I just set them on my Google Home. You can use Alexa or Siri to do the same, and when the timer goes off, there's really no debating. And I found that my kids actually like Google telling them that times up more so than me. Of course, they're not teens just yet, so talk to me in a few years