For their birthdays, my godchildren ask for V-Bucks – a kind of internet currency used to buy clothes or weapons or a glider for their avatars on a game they are obsessed with called Fortnite.
Their parents have held out. In order to get V-Bucks, you have to give the game your credit card or PayPal details. One parent I know is almost $1,000 in the hole because their child kept purchasing new outfits on the stored card. Easy to do.
But my godchildren are dying for V-Bucks, it’s all they want. Currently their avatars have grey skin. Wouldn’t it be great to play the game with cool pink skin?
I watch them play Fortnite and have to remember to breathe. It is stressful and moves quickly.
“Just hide out on the edge of the island,” I urge, as their avatars in their shameful grey skin, with their blunt non-V-Bucks axe, enter a barn where they will surely get killed. They explain that a storm comes through the island and you have to move closer in, where the danger of being killed is high. As they are explaining this to me, they are killed.
It is the most exciting 15 minutes you can have as a 10-year-old. It is fast and the stakes are high (you could and will die). You play with your friends – looking out for each other – with up to 100 people playing at once. Dying is, of course, terrible. But as dinner is called and we start another game, I realise it doesn’t matter. You just play all night, and maybe if you’re good enough, you eventually are the last person on the island.
A few days later, my editor calls when I am in Tasmania for two weeks covering a festival. Did I know there was a new game that all the kids are playing that takes their attention away from their school work and makes them stay up all night killing each other, he asks?
Yes, I do know that game! My editor asks if I would, perhaps, play Fortnite for a week to see how addictive it is? Of course, as long as I can put V-Bucks on expenses.
But getting addicted to Fortnite is much more difficult than I anticipate. None of my friends want to play with me and short of hanging outside primary schools to find Fortnite friends, I have to hit up people I know. At this festival in Hobart people are always rushing off to see German post-punk industrial techno, and look confused when I ask them to play Fortnite with me. But one of the editors from Vice, a 20-year-old called Shaad, knows the game.
“I’ll play Fortnite with you,” he says without much enthusiasm – before looking at my phone and telling me it is too old to download the game.
“You need an Xbox or something.”
It is two days into what was meant to be my week getting addicted to Fortnite. There is so much hype about this game being addictive and accessible. How can a game be addictive if it’s hard to get and no one will play with you?
I put a call out on Twitter: “Anyone in Hobart got an Xbox I can borrow for a week to play Fortnite?”
My colleague First Dog on the Moon replies. He has an Xbox and will bring it into Hobart (a two-hour round trip from his home) when he comes in on Saturday night to watch the wrestling at Night Mass.
At 1:30am, I notice several missed calls and texts from Dog. He has the Xbox – where am I? I am across the road in an underground cinema dancing to techno and can’t hear my phone.
Dog takes his Xbox back to the farm.
Later that week, Dog drops the Xbox at my hotel but I have already squandered four days where I could have been getting addicted.
Nonetheless, I can play it for 16 hours a day and fasttrack my addiction, I think. Then the Guardian will have to pay for me to do gaming rehab in South Korea. But when I go to pick up Dog’s Xbox, it has gone missing somewhere between the front desk and my room.
Frantic calls from the front desk are made to the home of the morning concierge: “Have you seen an Xbox? It was left here!”
No one has seen it.
Meanwhile, I am becoming stressed. The week is almost over and I haven’t even played Fortnite, let alone become addicted to it. How am I going to file my story? How am I going to find Dog’s Xbox?
If I’ve lost it, will he ever draw again?
How to break it to Dog?
In my hotel room, I try to download Fortnite onto my Mac, even though internet forums advise against it, saying that playing it on a Mac is “laggy.” During the partial download, my computer crashes and the 65 tabs I have open all shut.
I am still yet to play a game and my week of getting addicted to Fortnite is about to come to an end. I speak to my godchildren who are loving their V-Bucks sick. One of them has bought a “tomato head avatar”; the other a “Deep Space Lander”.
It’s alright for some, I think sourly. They have the friends and the equipment (and now the V-Bucks) to get addicted to Fortnite.
The rest of us – with our old phones, our borrowed and missing Xboxes, our overloaded PCs – can only dream of being gripped in such a thrall.
- Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia writer and columnist
