College Football Is Officially Developing a 'Fortnite' Problem
Video games are a convenient scapegoat for social ills in America, blamed for everything from poor school performance as kids prioritize games over homework to causing mass murder in the case of games like Grand Theft Auto.
But one thing that is beyond debate is that games, more than any other media, have a nasty habit of overrunning their allotted space in a healthy leisure-time life almost by design, as everyone who’s ever been playing a game like Civilization VI or Fallout 4 at night and found to their chagrin that the sun is rising outside their window knows all too well.
Enter Fortnite, the online “battle royale” game that has become so much a part of popular culture lately that even if you couldn’t pick Tommy Vercetti or Agent 47 out of a virtual police lineup, you’ve probably heard of it, especially if you’ve got kids.
The game, which uses every trick known to psychology to keep people playing — from the “almost had it” nature of seeing a slot machine with the jackpot symbol one place away on the final reel from the losing spin that just cost you your bet at a casino, to the rapid iteration time of matches that last just a few minutes, to the Skinner box-like distribution of intermittent rewards — is notoriously addictive.
And for some college football players, it’s getting in the way of their NFL dreams.
Which brings us to Olamide Zacchaeus, a senior wide receiver at the University of Virginia.
Zacchaeus had the Fortnite bug and had it bad, and he knew it, according to a report in USA Today.
Zacchaeus, who has a self-admitted addictive personality, said of the game that “anything I do, I want to be the best at it.”
Which meant staying up way too late playing matches, which cut into his alertness as he was chronically sleep-deprived.
It meant having his free time caught up in a single-minded determination to play the game.
The worst part? “I was kind of slacking on the things I was supposed to do,” he said, referring to the reason he had a scholarship in the first place, as in actually playing football.
Last September, his junior year looming, Zacchaeus deleted Fortnite off his Xbox.
“I had to do it,” he said.
Other players have commented on the game, which starts with 100 players in a wide-open landscape and rapidly shrinks down via a collapsing game border — in sports terms, imagine a football game where the field lines got smaller after every play and whoever got tackled was eliminated until two guys played “Breakthrough and Conquer” from American Gladiators to determine a winner — to a last-man-standing thrilling finish.
“Every single time I go in the locker room I see that game on the TV, every second of the day,” said Virginia linebacker Chris Peace. “It’s an intense game, even if you’re not playing. One guy can be playing and the whole locker room will be watching.”
Offensive lineman Martez Ivey of the Florida Gators told USA Today that “everyone but a few people play” on his team.
Brant Mitchell of Georgia Tech said “it’s crazy how many people are into the game.”
And Maryland lineman Derwin Gray went a step further, saying, “I wouldn’t even say it’s taken over college football; it’s taken over the world. Whoever made that game, I take my hat off to them.”
Over 125 million people have downloaded Fortnite for game consoles, computers and mobile devices; the game is free to play, while players can spend real-world money to buy various in-game merchandise, which is how developer Epic Games makes its money.
Ivey admitted to having spent $300 on such in-game perks, and that’s relatively small change.
In the free-to-play industry, they use the same term casinos use for high rollers: “whales.”
Whales are known to spend thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars on what in theory is completely optional gear, and stories abound of people whose financial lives have been ruined by free-to-play “microtransactions” adding up.
But good luck trying to finance the habit with revenue sources like Twitch, which gamers use to broadcast their gameplay sessions on the service in exchange for a cut of the ad revenue their streams generate for the Twitch company.
The NCAA doesn’t allow athletes to make money using their likeness or their name, and that includes leveraging their fame to monetize a Twitch stream or YouTube channel; they would lose their eligibility.
Coaches, meanwhile, are a bit at a loss to explain the popularity of the game that has a hold over those they coach.
“I call a high school kid and ask, ‘You play that Fort Hill?’ I don’t even know the name of it,” said Pittsburgh coach Pat Narduzzi. “It bothers me that people are that into it. But that’s the generation we’re in. They’d rather do that than work.”
Maryland coach D.J. Durkin, meanwhile, decries the rise of the indoor generation.
“Video games are taking over the world,” Durkin said. “What happened to being outside? You should just go outside and just play. Those days are gone. I’m trying to bring them back with my own guys.”
But even an old-school guy like Durkin knows that things could be a lot worse.
“I’d rather they’re playing video games than doing other things,” Durkin said.
Eventually, young people will move on to the next big thing. But for now, they just need to make sure that the game doesn’t take over their lives.
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