Ignore the Fortnite scaremongering – the problem is screen time, not games

Every few years, a video game gets so popular with children that someone decides there must be something wrong with it. When I was a kid, it was Pokémon; when my stepson was little, it was Minecraft; now, of course, it is Fortnite, a colourful, battle royal-style shooter that's currently so popular that pop star Drake and footballer Dele Alli are fans. When children get into things, they tend to do so quite intensely. There is nothing wrong with a kid getting so into Fortnite that she wants to play it all the time; it's just passion. Naturally we shouldn't let them play it all the time, in the same way as we'd probably step in to prevent a 10-year-old watching six episodes of Stranger Things in a row. But there is nothing sinister about the current obsession with Fortnite, or with the game itself.