Fortnite developers facing potential gaming addiction lawsuit

"A lot of elements of gaming are positive."

That's one of the key messages from online Kiwi watchdog Netsafe, amid headlines that one of the gaming industry's giants, Epic Games, is taken to court.

Netsafe New Zealand chief customer office Leanne Ross says there's been "a real call for help from a lot of parents" over the past 10 years as gaming technology, and the way children socialise online, has transformed.

"While Fortnite and a lot of contemporaries have things like parental controls and guides in place, what they never seem to give parents is that magic number, the answer to the question 'how many hours is a safe amount for my child?'" she said.

While that number may be elusive, a judge in Canada has heard one example of a child spending 7700 hours – or around 320 days – on Fortnite in less than a two-year span.

One of the parents involved with the lawsuit says her two sons had a "gaming addiction".

"They were coming home from school and they didn't want to go outside to play basketball, they didn't want to go and physically hang out with their friends," says mum Deanna Greenstein.

Ross, who formerly led the New Zealand Game Developers Association, says she wasn't surprised the lawsuit was being brought forward.

She says the answer to the problem of how much screentime our children should have lies in compromising and conversations.

"Essentially, our advice to parents is just to remember that a lot of elements of gaming are positive. There's lots of social opportunity, there's lots of multitasking, problem solving, teamworking. The problem elements of it are the amount of time a young person might start to want to spend there," she said.

Practising what you preach is another crucial part of the equation for those laying down the rules.

"Often as parents, we're not always modelling the behaviour we're asking young people to see. So it can be really easy for us to spend too much time online, or on our phones, and that can make it a bit more challenging to enforce those agreements that we make with our young people because it might look a bit hypocritical."

A recent study in the US compared the brains of two 10-year old classmates, one of whom enjoyed gaming and another who didn't.

The boy who enjoyed playing video games, which included Fortnite, showed far more brain activity in the dopamine area of the brain when shown a video of shooting video games.

Dr Andrew Newberg, who ran the study, says "these are areas that are very involved in our rewards system of the brain", and like all addictions they carry the risks of negative side effects.

"Just like with a drug or alcohol, they actually experience withdrawal symptoms. They might feel kind of down or upset or irritable when they're not able to play their games," he said.

Ross agrees, particularly when talking about one technique used by some of the gaming industry giants, called 'loot boxing'.

"Loot boxing is essentially a way for young people to attempt to purchase items within games, but the problem a lot of parents have with it is that it's quite akin to gambling in the sense that sometimes you're parting with money, and you're not guaranteed what you're going to get," she explained.

"The way they (loot boxes) spike adrenaline and dopamine, they really are quite similar to the psychological effects that you get when you play gambling machines like pokies or something.

"So I think a lot of parents don't want their young people to be getting involved in that kind of behaviour at an age where they're not quite ready, or not able to self-regulate the high they're getting from that essentially."