I grew up similarly to you (though less army men, more Legos), but I do think we are looking at a difference of kind today with video games. You're right in that Fortnite would be different--but that's because Fortnite (or, worse, mobile games) are a dopamine flood. Intuitively it feels like the loot treadmill of an old MMO (I lost a lot of friends to WoW addiction back in The Day) but with a tighter loop that more easily can ensnare people, particularly kids. I absolutely can't prove it, and wouldn't judge somebody for letting a kid play them...but I would be a little uneasy if I had kids.

How is Fortnite different from any other FPS we had twenty years ago, like Tribes?

Loot boxes, mostly. Gacha games and the like pioneered it and now it's in everything. The slot-machine pull does something to people, and I'm more worried about what it does to brains that haven't completely set yet.

Fortnite doesn't have loot boxes. There's skins and dances, but you buy them all directly, there's no RNG. At least that I've found in my ~30 hours of playing the game.

It's just like golden eye, but now you've got to pay to play as odjob.

Sorry, you're right, I shouldn't have used the example of Fortnite when I personally play PUBG. And Overwatch. Both of which do. ;) My reach exceeded my grasp.

Although Fortnite doesn't have explicit lootboxes, there's certainly a related addictive effect to simply opening chests, stumbling across a Llama, etc. Have you not heard a younger player squeal 'scaaarrr'?

Using 'enlightened whiteness' is mildly insulting both to people who happen to be white and those who are non-white who share the same beliefs and behaviour.

i'm white and i don't find it personally offensive. there is a certain set of risk-averse behaviors that seem ubiquitous among the white (upper) middle class. and maybe this is uncharitable of me, but i do actually think these people feel more virtuous because they do these things, or at least do them to signal virtue. when someone uses a phrase like "enlightened whiteness" or "SWPL", it seems there's a high chance that we both instantly picture the same loosely related set of things that would be hard to describe otherwise.

That's exactly how a white person would respond ;)

> Watching tv or playing with computers is not intrinsically good or bad

Studies disagree. Too much screen time isn't great for kid development. At best, we're not sure what sort of effect it has on kids.

How do we not know the effects? People have been plunking their kids down in front of the TV for hours a day for fifty years at this point.

edit: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/style/phones-children-sil...

Part of the reason is that showing a child a TV screen isn't the same as injecting heroin directly into their brainstem; the effects aren't super drastic, and researchers are reluctant to come out and say that X absolutely causes Y, when there's only some correlation, and it's not obvious.

We _know_ that eating a bunch of cyanide will kill you. We don't know exactly what sort of effects watching TV will have on you, because it's not quite so directly causative.

Anyway, we do know and suspect a lot of stuff:

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/08/28/343735856/kids-an...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/behind-online-behavi...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2018/04/16/how-too...

Well, the obvious answer is that the effects are small enough to be very difficult to reveal with simple studies

I’m not sure it has anything to do with whiteness, but it certainly is attached to class.