Epic Games and Disney announced Wednesday that they would build multiverse lands inside Fortnite, including Disney, Avatar, Marvel Star Wars, and Pixar. This follows on the heels of the surprise LEGO Fortnite reveal for Season 5 late last year, which is more of a Minecraft building land than the Battle Royale most people associate with Fortnite.

Read on to learn what you need to know before you let their kids play Fortnite: how to establish guardrails and coping mechanisms before engaging in the gunplay.

What We Know About Disneyland in Fortnite

I’m calling it Disneyland in Fornite for now because it looks to be much more than just the characters available to play. They end the teaser with Play. Watch. Engage. Shop, which are fairly obvious clues. Since Disney invested $ 1.5 billion into Epic Games, a company that laid off 16% of its staff last fall, the collaboration will surely be an exiting step forward.

Why Should I Let My Kids Play Fortnite?

There are enough articles on why parents shouldn’t allow Fortnite, and I am not here to change your mind if Fortnite is a hard No in your house. The game is highly addictive and does not mesh with some developing brains. In fact, if your child is prone to or shows any of these behaviors, you should exercise more caution. Our household initially laid down stricter guidelines around Fortnite than any other game.

But if LEGO Fortnite showed us anything, it’s this: there are many ways to let your family enjoy the game without lifting a weapon. If your kids give you the old “I need to play Fortnite so I know what my friends are talking about/fit in with my friends/it isn’t that bad, really,” then exploring the immersive Disney lands could be a way to give them a taste of the game. You can start without the Battle Royale, give them some experience on the game and see how they react to it, then determine whether or when you will open the floodgates to the main game arenas.

There may well be some violent play in the Star Wars and Marvel areas, but I don’t exactly see Anna and Elsa jumping from a Battle Bus (maybe a Battle Sleigh).

Set the Guardrails to this Video Game Early

This tactic involves some heavy parental involvement at first. Basic precautions:

• Limit their gameplay to non-violent play at first and schedule consistent check-in times when the family can evaluate moving into Battle Royales (every three months is one example).
• Fortnite is played online and with other players. There’s no getting around that. You can, however, turn off chat and turn off unknown friend requests. Explain to your child that there are multiple dangers to being online and having contact with players you don’t know or haven’t met in real life. Yes, there are layers to the online dangers that you can discuss, no matter their age.
• Set clear start and slightly flexible end times. This must be done with the understanding that you can’t pause a Fortnite game, and leaving early may cause a rift between players. You must be flexible regarding an exact end time to show you understand and respect their gameplay, which will likely help later when you do need set stronger rules.
• Discuss the addictive nature of the game and work with your children on ways to handle it. Our guide to emotional language can help to establish vocabulary before starting down the road to Fortnite.

In Game Currency and Guns

• Explain how Vbucks are sometimes necessary to move forward in the game, but the Shop is also there for the sole purpose of getting you to spend more and more money. I can only imagine how this conversation will be even more prominent in a Disney collaboration. Start with the Discourse on Advertising and Kids (specifically Influencer Advertising since a number of influencers work with Fortnite).
• Play as a Family so You Understand the Gameplay. Obviously we cannot as parents play every game with them, nor do they want us to. Playing the game with them will help you understand the emotional and physical process of the game, but that’s only the surface reason to play with them. Besides the simple joy of connection, it gives you inside information that allows you to go into more detail during the conversations around playing Fortnite. I also believe that when you show effort toward understanding they games, your children are more likey to listen to you when you must lay down the law.
• Have a clear discussion on guns in video games versus reality, and how they would act with a gun in real life. If you live in the United States, it’s hard to avoid discussing guns and their dangers. At whatever point you open your household to playing in the battles, know this: the game is cartoony, but it makes guns and learning about guns very fun. Still, I was honestly shocked at how much fun it is to play. So talk to them about how no matter how fun it is to play with guns in Fortnite, in real life, guns are not toys. Ask what they would do if there was a gun at their friends’ house, if their friend wanted to play with it, etc. More resources are below.

Discourse: How to Handle Emotions When You “Rage”

Teach your children how to use emotional language to help themselves when they lose. And warn them that they will lose quite often, especially at the beginning of their gameplay.

Family Therapist Lauren Mazzarese explained one method for helping children through an emotional breakdown:

Whether it’s having a good old fashioned tantrum, or whether they’re having a child-sized panic attack, or they’re furiously angry; at that moment they have zero language. One of the things that are going to be important as you develop a child’s emotional language and emotional growth is the ability to regulate those emotions: not make them go away but regulate them.

The Rainbow

So this is a tool that I have a lot of parents using: The Rainbow. It’s based on a technique that adults can use in periods of significant distress. You ask the adult to stop and name the following: five things they can see, four things they can hear, three things they can touch, two things they can smell, and one thing they can taste.

That’s for adults. A younger child cannot handle that in the middle of a breakdown. However, a child knows the colors of the rainbow. And so the child is melting down in whatever form, you help them stop and say, “Hey, let’s look around and find something that’s red,” and work with the child to find each color of the rainbow. It really helps take the child out of the distress and focus on something neutral, focus on something tangible, focus on something that is outside of themselves. And if you’re really looking for something red, you can’t be thinking about a lot of other things.

The parent’s job is to talk them through it, especially the first few times. If they get to purple, and they’re still in crisis, then okay, let’s do it again. Let’s try it again. You use this over and over again, and eventually, it will start to be a cue; it’ll prime their brain when they get upset.

“Using Emotional Language to Have Tough Conversations,” 2 Nov 2022.

Still Not Sure?

Fortnite is truly not for everyone, and certainly not for every child. As always with these primers and reviews, OutThink is here to contextualize kids’ media, helping families open up dialogues with one another. If you have more questions about Fortnite, please comment here or talk to us on Instagram or in our private Facebook group.

Read more: Primer: PlayStation 5 Parental Controls

Photo/Image Credit: Cindy Marie Jenkins, Canva, and Fortnite/Epic Games

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Sources:

• Ellis, Nicole, and Kuhn, Casey, “How to talk to children about gun violence,” PBS News Hour, 2023 Jan 18, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/how-to-talk-to-children-about-gun-violence.
• Gratton, Samantha, “Best Benefits of Playing Video Games Together,” PBS Kids, 2023 Dec 20.
• Jenkins, Cindy Marie, “Using Emotional Language to Have Tough Conversations,” OutThink Media, 2 Nov 2022.
• Loveling, Nancy, “Kids and Violent VIdeo Games Like Fortnite: How is the Brain Affected?” Psych Central, 25 July 2022.