Representative photo of mother trying to get son's attention as he plays mobile games (Cover Image Source: Getty Images | Draganab)
With over 650 million players worldwide, "Fortnite" has captivated kids globally, who spend countless hours exploring virtual islands and battling it out. However, this growing obsession has raised concerns among parents and teachers. One creative mom found a hilarious way to limit her child's screen time after bedtime. In a viral post on the r/FortNiteBR subreddit, Redditor u/farting_dog33 posed as a teen who wanted to play Fortnite past 9 p.m., but his mom told him the game would stop working at that time. He turned to Reddit to ask, “How and why does it turn off after then?”
Close-up image of gamer teenager playing pc games with headset (Representative Image Source: Getty Images | Photo by Carol Yepes)
The post quickly gained 11,000 upvotes and hundreds of comments, with users rallying behind the mom. Some Redditors offered mock "scientific" explanations for why the game shuts down, while others chimed in with spooky warnings about what could happen if he ignored his mom's advice. Many encouraged the kid to get more sleep instead of gaming late into the night. "Yep, it turns off so everyone can get a good night’s sleep. I think they just unplug it somewhere," joked u/tommy7154. Another user, u/available_day_7171, added, “It's to make sure everyone gets enough sleep before school or work.”
u/giamborghini warned the Fortnite player saying, “If you try to log in after 9 pm when the game is down you may lose your skins because of server errors.” u/mrspicyohhhh said, “Bro the game just magically turns itself off after 9 pm!” u/baddonny added a science-fiction touch to the entire scenario, and wrote in a comment, “It’s a special internet thing called the 'Coriolis effect' and when the earth rotates past 9 pm all the tubes for the internet start to freeze.”
Although this is an entirely fictional scenario and the writer of this post is actually a man from New Zealand, the argument is not uncommon among parents and kids. Writing in the New York Times, a father described how his 13-year-old kid got addicted to gaming. “My 13-year-old kid got a PlayStation 4 and started staying up late playing Fortnite online with friends. Then he got a gaming PC, became a ranked Valorant player, and seemingly overnight my wife and I were regularly woken up by his yelling over FaceTime and Discord or his YouTube streams.”
Teenage boy with headphones on ignores mother and plays video games on phone (Representative Image Source: Getty Images | Photo by Liubomyr Vorona)
They added that, eventually, the boy’s schoolwork started to get affected and they limited his late-night gaming time to weekends, vacations, and holidays. He wrote that using Wi-Fi parental controls or setting up a firewall can stop a child from staying up gaming overnight. Apart from that, parents can stop the internet services on children’s phones using the carrier’s family plan administration page. But what’s even more important is to re-enforce the benefits of good sleep and the harms of staying till late in the kids’ minds.
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