Eight Years Old and Already This Mad

My record in competitive online games is consistent: I am bad at all of them. StarCraft, League of Legends, Overwatch—useless across the board. I once spent so long running in circles in a Final Fantasy XIV dungeon that my party members screamed at me through text chat in three languages, which I fully deserved. These days I stay in single-player territory: Skyrim, Far Cry 5, Yakuza Zero. Games where no one can find me.

Fortnite is the one I’ve never touched, and the reason is simple self-preservation. Within five minutes I’d be listening to an eight-year-old inform me, with genuine authority, about the sexual history of my mother while I fail to understand why a cartoon character with a pickaxe is shooting at me. This is not entertainment. This is what happens when you give twelve million children access to each other and a ranking system. I know myself well enough to know I would not survive it with any dignity intact.

Jimmy Kimmel ran a segment on his late-night show where parents turned off the TV mid-match while their kids were deep in a Fortnite game. The footage is on YouTube and it confirms everything. These children are not playing a game—they’re inside a religion, and their parents just kicked over the altar. The screaming, the tears, the genuine betrayal on those small furious faces—it’s funny for about thirty seconds and then it’s slightly terrifying, and then it’s funny again. I’ve stopped expecting things to be fine. I’m leaning into the climate situation now. The sooner it’s over, honestly, the better.