Quebecois parents sue Fortnite – Jack Thompson 2.0 or something more?

I stopped following “gaming” news ages ago because it’s almost always a bunch of cancer, but this particular headline kept coming to my attention – Quebec judge authorizes class-action lawsuit against ‘addictive’ Fortnite video game [Archive] and that got me thinking a little bit. Not about the article itself mind you, I believe a class action lawsuit like this has been a long time coming somewhere in the world. I’m mainly thinking about the responses from a lot of the gamers, the gist of them being “it’s the parents’ fault for not taking the game away or using parental controls” and on the surface I agree. Are parents these days a bunch of wimps who can’t even correct their bratty children’s behavior? Yes, yes they are. Are they also stupid and ignorant about technology? Also yes.

But think about it this way. Fortnite at its core is marketed to children. Granted I don’t know if that’s the explicitly stated demographic that Epic Games is targeting, but the cartoony art style, the flashy colors and the regularly recurring skins from popular kids’ media could and probably does make the average person think that Fortnite is a kids’ game. With that out of the way, there are few if any on-the-surface warning signs that would indicate to non-gamer parents that Fortnite is an addictive or predatory game and therein lies the problem. Epic has, whether deliberately or otherwise, used marketing and the aesthetics of the game to trick parents into not paying attention to it until their child’s mental state and behavior have already been altered.

A lot of the gamers conveniently brush over that part and are eager to come to Epic’s defense, claiming that the parents in this case are no better than Jack Thompson, trying to stir up yet another moral panic about video games so they could profit off of it. That got me thinking, just what kind of Stockholm syndrome do you have to have in order to compare the two as if there’s no clear distinction between them? Like, I get that gamers have been subjected to the Boiling Frog phenomenon where overtly predatory practices by video game companies have become normalized and are now no longer questioned but I didn’t think it quite reached that point yet. It’s a sad state of affairs that I have to remind people that just ~15 years ago the normal practice was you buy a game – you get all of it, not just some of it with the rest being behind additional paywalls. I guess zoomers will never know a time where they didn’t get royally screwed every time they wanted to play a video game, but back to the lawsuit.

This isn’t Jack Thompson 2.0 at all. There’s no agenda being pushed here. “Karens” aren’t coming to censor your video games’ artistic content. This has nothing to do with the “video games cause violence” debate. This is about overtly predatory business practices and every time someone wants the government to do something about it, gamers screech about Jack Thompson as if that has anything to do with it. It’s also how Sony and Microsoft bought up basically every last AAA studio to the point of becoming a duopoly in the AAA game space – because every time someone calls for any kind of regulation be applied to the industry, they’re booed off the stage. Well I’m personally tired of that. They shouldn’t be let off the hook just because they make entertainment products. They don’t even make them to begin with. The executives and investors at those corporations are not the same people who develop the games you love. They’re not in the developer or artist teams that actually work on the games. Stop making excuses for them. Just fucking stop. They’re the ones ruining your video games, not those parents.

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