10 things adults can learn playing FORTNITE with their kids

Chances are you have heard of the video game Fortnite.

It’s taken the world by storm; currently there are up to 128 million players on the platform worldwide, generating its creators, Epic Games, over $318 million in revenue every month. All of this from a game that is free to download and play on your preferred platform – be it on your iPhone during the train ride home, to a late night session on a Nintendo Switch.

The game itself is a mass online player vs player tournament where 100 players leap out of a plane onto a small island and fight each other until only one is left with the playing area contracting as the game progresses (think Hunger Games) forcing players together. Weapons and items like rifles, traps and grenade launchers are hidden around the island forcing players to explore the island to arm themselves and gather building material. With these materials, like wood, steel and brick, you can build structures that allow you to hide and defend yourself. The last survivor is crowned the winner.

This concept is called “Battle Royale” in the gaming world, and is becoming increasingly popular as players move from games that give them a consistent and known experience, to ones where the actual gameplay differs depending on the players they’re playing with. Fortnite is the first game to successfully release this mode at scale, and its ability to bring people of all walks of life together is a major factor in its stunning success.

Now, my son and his friends spend most of their time playing this game, especially in a mode called “Squads”, where instead of playing on your own, you’re teamed up with 3 other players to survive the island. They communicate with each other by headset and work together to gather weapons and resources to help them attain that elusive victory.

At the beginning, I watched both my son and daughter play Fortnite for hours on end, intrigued by what all the fuss was about. I used to be a big gamer from a teen right into my 30’s, and I still play the odd game, but life’s demands as an adult have put an end to something I genuinely loved doing.

So about 3 months ago I played my first game of Fortnite.

To say I was terrible would be an understatement.

I lasted about 2 minutes before some random player killed my character. I tried about 6 more times in a row and the same thing happened every time. An hour or so passed and the same thing kept happening - I was not enjoying this and I gave up in disgust, knowing full well that there were numerous teenagers out there giggling to themselves as they ended my stay on the island.

My adult brain kicked in and told me, “Chris, you’re too old to play this game, your reflexes aren’t great and you just don’t have the time to learn the right moves and strategies to be good at this game – give up. Go invent something new on your 3D printer.”

I told myself this to justify giving up, but the reality was that my ego could not handle that young kids were beating me so easily and that I had lost the gaming skills I used to have. I didn’t play the game again for a week, but the weekend came around and I thought maybe I had an off night and was just tired, so I tried again.

You know what happened next.

I lasted anywhere from one to 2 minutes in the game, once again giving up in disgust after about 2 hours of playing. I didn’t play again for a month, maybe it was time to take up golf.

But fast forward another month and I now regularly play with my son and his friends, in addition to some late-night sessions by myself. I have gotten much better and have even managed to win a game or 2. My son loves it that he gets to play with his dad. His friends think his dad is awesome and I get to do something that is fun and gives me complete downtime from thinking about work.

So, what happened?

I realised I was approaching the whole thing with the mindset of an adult. I like to think I naturally demonstrate many traits that are associated with growth mindset: curiosity, thirst for learning, the belief that anyone can learn something with enough effort, embracing change as opportunity. But what dawned on me was that this game had triggered a fixed mindset.

As I reflected about what changed while I was enjoying a game last night, I realised that many of the ways we approach new challenges in the business world are approached with an adult mindset and that bringing back the inner child can help you think about problems in a whole new way.

The ten things I learned are outlined below. Hopefully you might find these useful to make you think differently about approaching a new challenge in your life, or just get you to play a game of Fortnite. It’s so much fun!

1. You’re never too old to learn

I love learning new things. I always have. Yet for some reason I decided this game was different. Fornite requires you to learn many skills - scavenging, building, fighting, defending. It’s overwhelming at first and you can’t learn it all at once. Focusing on getting a little better at one thing, then a little better at the next makes it manageable. The Japanese have a word for this principle: Kaizen, the belief of continuous improvement. The hypotheses is that spending five minutes focusing on something every day will make better at it, no matter your age.

Kids do this naturally. They just start to play and expect to learn on the way. They are persistent and watching them play Fortnite they just keep trying, failing, learning and adapting. 

A modern leader or knowledge worker cannot afford to stop learning ever. How can you possibly bring innovation and new thinking to your business if you’re never looking outside? Anyone can learn something new, the trick is taking a methodical approach to it.

Here are a couple of habits I have formed in this regard. I set aside one hour at the end of every day to read. This could be LinkedIn which is great for free form learning as it can take you down many rabbit holes. I also keep a running to do list on Google Keep app of any interesting stories, white paper or article I hear about. I use this time to read those. I also use my commute to work and home every day to learn. Podcasts and youtube are incredible free resources in this regard. So next time you binge watch 2 or 3 hours of Netflix , think about what you could have learned and see if you can start to fit in a learning habit.

2. Be Fearless

Kids don’t worry about failure. They just jump in and get started. Both my son and daughter just started playing, and like me, their games ended quickly and often, but they didn’t care. For them playing the game wasn’t about winning it, but about playing and having fun for countless hours. But they wanted to win, and like all kids, were very persistent. When they want something, they are relentless and don’t lose focus easily.

The combination of being fearless to get started and relentless determination are traits that many successful start-ups will point to as their secret sauce. I realised I was setting an expectation on myself before I even started playing that I needed to be great at this game – a mindset that led me to originally giving up the game far too early. I’ll leave you this with this example – I sat next to the CEO of Ingogo on a recent plane flight. We talked about the challenges he faced early on. His drivers were intimidated, false reviews placed online, personal threats, his car tyres slashed as just a few. He never gave up. – being fearless has its rewards.

3. Use your imagination and don’t always follow the rules

Einstein famously said “Imagination is more important than knowledge” and watching kids play Fornite is the embodiment of this statement. They don’t have pre-conceived ideas about what you can and should do. Whilst I would follow patterns I had learned when I played games, they would make their own rules about how certain building should be built or a particular team attacked.

The problem for me was none of my existing rules apply in Fortnite - the laws of physics are not the same yet I was applying real world rules to a new problem space. Kids do not do this, they just use whatever means they have to creatively solve a problem. The structures they build and ways they move in the game are built by experimentation and use of imagination. I watched a great TED Talk which in part changed the way I approached starting to play this game again. The underlying message from this talk was that a bunch of adults told a group of kids that a certain problem couldn’t be solved. The children didn’t know they had limits. They had no idea it couldn’t be done so they kept persisting and found a solution to a massive pollution problem facing mankind.

In the same way, the more I used my imagination and didn’t follow real world rules, the more fun the game became. As I started having more fun, I became relaxed and more creative. The result was I got better at the game.

There will always be problems in your business that tried and tested fixes might not work on – it’s important to keep thinking outside the box, so that when such problem arise, you’re capable of finding a new way of doing something. The trick is to realise you’re probably applying old world thinking to a new world problem.

4. Trust your inner voice

Children are instinctive, following their intuition because they have to. They haven’t built up all the learning and rules that guide their behaviour, and you can see this in action when they play.

In Fortnite, they know to chop down tress for wood and smash certain types of rocks for brick. It seems obvious to them. Adults spend years learning to follow methodologies, procedures, rules, recipes. Google has become our replacement for trying things out ourselves. Why bother when I can get the answer in 5 seconds on my phone?

But that inner voice and instinct cannot be ignored. We have millions of years of evolution to thank for creating that inner voice yet we’ve learned to tune it out. Almost every time I have disobeyed my gut feeling by using rational reasoning it has ended up being a bad decision.

I also have a friend who is an ex-policeman that now runs self-defence and awareness classes. The first thing they teach students is to listen to your inner voice or gut. If you feel scared or unsure about someone, trust your feeling, don’t rationalise it away. There are 1000’s of people who have been interviewed post some kind of violent trauma who said they wish they had listened to their gut as it had warned them. 

Being aware of this inner voice is something you need to embrace whether you’re playing a game, evaluating a deal or deciding on your next hire. It’s not the only data point of course, but don’t underestimate its importance.

5. Don’t be afraid of change

Adults usually look at change with a degree of fear and uncertainty, worrying about how it will impact us and its implications for our future. Kids seem to just get on with it and embrace the opportunity.

Fornite has seasons, which each one bringing about a major change to the game, be it a map alteration, weapon addition or mode modification. Whenever these changes come out my kids can’t wait to try them, seeing it as an opportunity to try something different and have fun.

For me, when these changes first came out I felt threatened - will this change this change take me backwards? Will this effort I have put in bee undermined by the change? But after this initial thought, I just decided to approach it like a child and have a go by focusing on having fun.

Turns out I really love 50 vs 50 mode.

The point being change can be scary yes but embracing it most often leads to new opportunities.

6. Laugh and have fun

Listening to my kids play is a joyous thing – it’s is full of laughter and emotion with the odd fight that ends in tears along the way. The joy they see in little things like discovering a new emote (a dance move characters can perform on demand) or changing their characters skin (clothing and look) is wonderful to behold. They look for the fun in whatever they do, they have not yet learned to hide their emotions.

As adults we learn to hide them - don’t show fear, don’t show joy, don’t show sadness. I don’t believe this is healthy for you or the people working for you; they need to see you are a real person. When you do they will be more willing to connect with you and take risks.

Playing a video game like Fornite is a great way to express emotion. Happiness, sadness and frustration are all in a day’s work. Taking time out to enjoy life or have fun with your team is like releasing the pressure valve every so often. If you don’t do it the pressure builds up and eventually….boom!

7. It's ok to be the hero

Next time your child tells you a story, listen to how they tell it.

• “We won our basketball game today dad. I scored 6 points and helped the team win”
• “Today I got picked for a part in the school play. It’s one of the biggest parts”
• “My team got the win in Fortnite today dad. I was 2nd last standing in our team and I took out 2 of their players to make it easy for our team to win”.

When kids play video games like Fortnite, they are role playing. They all, even in a team, see themselves as a hero but know that the whole team is needed to win.

They are not ashamed of talking about their achievements, but adults are taught never to do this. “Be modest, don’t brag. If you do you will come across egotistical, arrogant”.

The result being we down play our wins and successes because being humble is a likeable trait. I often see post on LinkedIn that start with “I didn’t want to post this, or not comfortable self-promoting but..”. Of course, you don’t want to brag about yourself all the time, but for me the humble brag is far worse. Own your ideas and thoughts!

One of my former managers once said to me “Believe in yourself Chris, because if you don’t how do you expect others to believe in you?”

It’s ok to share your own personal and or team successes, tell people you might be presenting on a topic somewhere or share a blog or paper you have written. That’s the point of social platforms. I learn so much reading other people’s ideas and content.

A learning culture wouldn’t exist without teachers to teach so share away and be the hero of your story!

8. Try new things

I love learning, finding out how and why things work has been something I have always passionate about. I have tried every hobby and sport I can think of, and It appears my kids have also developed this trait which I am very thankful for.

When kids play Fortnite you can see this behaviour in action. They try new building techniques, experiment with new weapons. They rarely stick to a formula until right near the end where certain strategies are proven to win. Adults, on the other hand, are often frozen by fear - fear of failure, fear of injury, fear of embarrassment.

I can already see this fear of embarrassment kick in with my teenage daughter vs my young son who just throws himself into anything or will talk to anyone. For him trying new things is exhilarating.

Doing new things with a friend, partner or team brings you closer together and makes you feel alive.

As an example, several years back my leadership team and I decided to do Tough Mudder together. It’s a 19km run interspersed with 20 crazy obstacles designed to test your mental and physical strength and make you work as a team. The build-up, training and experience was amazing, none of us had ever done something like this before.

Twelve of us started the course and twelve of us finished together, and to this day I look back at that team as one of the tightest most cohesive units I have had the joy to work with.

9. You don’t know everything, its ok to ask for help

Children don’t need to have all the answers before they try something, they just jump in and assume they will learn while they try as no one has told them they have limits.

At a recent trip to a water park I observed my son try surfing on one of those artificial wave pools for the first time. There was no fear or hesitation, he assumed he would be able to learn how to do it. He wiped out in about 10 seconds his first try. He listened to the attendant and next time and lasted 30 seconds. Third time round a minute.

Clearly, kids are not afraid to ask for help.

I see it all the time when I play Fornite. Newbs (new players in the game) constantly ask me in game if I can spare a weapon or ammunition. I have never once had an adult in game ask for anything. And, come to think of it, nor have I asked anyone else in the game for help.

We finish school we get degrees, we progress in our careers and assume that we now need to know it all. Sorry for the reality check.

You can’t possibly keep up with the pace of change. Especially within the Technology industry. Asking for help will make you a better employee and/or leader. Asking for help shows vulnerability which makes you human.

Asking for help makes you stop and listen.

10. Observe the world around you closely

Children are curious creatures. They constantly look at things and ask “why?”. They constantly challenge ideas and norms and ask “why not” or “why can’t I?”.

•  Why can’t I play Fortnite for 8 hours straight?
• Why do I have to go to bed at 8.30pm?
• Why can’t I go to that party with my friends?
• Why is water blue?

When I play Fornite with my son and his mates, they constantly challenge each other and me. They watch each other intently and copy successful patterns. When their characters die they stay in the game as an observer and look at the strategies employed by both teams. This observing leads to innovating their own gameplay.

But eventually as they grow up they stop asking these questions. Why? Great innovators observe the world closely for problem spaces that need solutions. The modern practice of Human Centred Design revolves round observing human behaviour closely.

So take the time to stop, look and listen. You might just stumble across the next big innovation.

If you got this far consider yourself one of the curious ones. Thanks for reading. Love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Author: Chris Venter