when he decided what he wanted to do with hisand younger brother at home on Vancouver Island. When he grew up, he told them, he wanted to play pro soccer.
In September of 2021, Cody resumed in-person classes at a new school, but his mind was stuck online. To make friends, he asked his classmates what video games they played. After his second day of school, he came home and excitedly told his mom that he and another student had agreed to game together that night. Alana refused to let him log on. “It’s not a gaming night,” she explained. Cody whined and pleaded, but she held firm. He started to cry, and then came the screaming.
ies and breaking curfew—are being replaced by a new slate of compulsive, screen-based activities: playing video games, binging YouTube videos and mindlessly swiping through 15-second TikToks for hours on end. Parents who are none too pleased with this shift are wondering who they can hold accountable. To them, there is no target so ripe as the tech giants and video game makers who have made billions by co-opting their kids’ lives.
it. They’re also what convinced the Quebec courts to order cigarette makers to pay $15 billion to smokers in 2015. Epic is a gaming Goliath, with more than 50 offices and thousands of employees. That includes a lot of well-paid lawyers. The company is worth about $43 billion and has twoconglomerate Tencent and Tim Sweeney, the code-writing, Lambo-collecting geek who founded Epic 32 years ago under the slightly less sexy name Potomac Computer Systems.
In 2020, the Federal Trade Commission began investigating the company’s alleged use of dark patterns and collection of kids’ personal information. Whendebuted in 2017, the FTC alleged, it employed deceptive digital tricks known as “dark patterns” that made it easy for players to buy skins and exceedingly difficult for them to get their money back.