In the current season of Fortnite, players wield an arsenal designed to outgun their competition in a chaotic battle royale. From the Collateral Damage Assault Rifle to the Outlaw Shotgun, the game’s weapons are about one thing: survival of the fittest.
For the estimated 110 million active players who log into Fortnite monthly, these weapons are just part of the game and a way to climb the leaderboard. For many players, the game — and its guns — are a big part of their lives, not just to pass time but as a way to connect with friends.
That could help explain why, in a 2022 survey, nearly a third of young people, including almost half of young men, said that video games influenced their perspectives on guns. And that influence comes at a pivotal time: Research has shown that, on average, young men buy their first gun at around 19. But outside the virtual battlefield, real-world firearms are tied to significant dangers. That led a gun violence prevention organization to wonder: What if a strategy to promote gun safety for children and teens could be structured around gaming?
The result is Leave Guns in the Game, a new initiative from Project Unloaded. For the campaign, the gun violence prevention group is teaming up with Gen Z gaming content creators to deliver a message: In real life, guns don’t make you safer. They put you at greater risk of harm.
By partnering with popular TikTokers, YouTubers, and Twitch streamers, Leave Guns in the Game hopes to reach millions of young gamers with the facts about the dangers firearms pose — using the same platforms where they already spend their time.
“We can see from the data that guns lead to negative outcomes,” said Shiven Patel, a high school senior from California, who serves as co-chair of Project Unloaded’s Youth Council and is working on its gaming campaign. “I hope that by targeting guns and video games through creating influencer partnerships and ads that relate to teenagers, we can discourage gun ownership, and we could give people a more informed view and opinion of guns.”
Patel, who has been playing video games for as long as he can remember, said that the medium was one of the first that introduced him and his peers to firearms. A real-world experience made the reality of guns hit home. Two years ago, gunshots were fired in his school’s parking lot after a football game.
His experience isn’t unique: Gun violence has become the leading cause of death of children and teens — and Gen Z.
That prompted Patel to join Project Unloaded with the hope that he would be able to make a difference, specifically for young people, he said, because often, they can be left out of the conversations on solutions.
“I think we need to reach teenagers where they are and focus on what they like and what they do in order to change their perspectives,” Patel told us.
For young Americans, video games are a part of daily life: 85 percent of U.S. teens report playing video games, and 41 percent say they play them at least once a day. Four in 10 identify as a gamer. Gamers as a whole spend an average of 12 hours a week playing video games, many of them “shooter” games like Fortnite.
They also spend time watching others play. Some 41 percent of users on Twitch are between 16 and 24 years old. As just one example, 15 million hours of Fortnite content are streamed weekly on platforms like Twitch. That’s not to mention other massively popular, multiplayer “first-person shooter” games like Apex Legends and Call of Duty, which boast weapons that are similar to guns that can be found in the actual world.
In its first Twitch stream, Project Unloaded joined a streamer to play Fortnite. “His audience was incredibly supportive,” said Taylor Maxwell, the managing director of Project Unloaded. “They shared stories of how gun violence had impacted their lives and why they were supportive of this partnership; they were excited that he had a sponsorship, and they wanted him to win, and because of that, they were willing to hear about our work and why guns make them less safe.”
Project Unloaded’s leadership worked to ensure that the campaign is rooted in information-sharing rather than associating firearms with gaming. There’s a fraught history behind that objective: Politicians have long demonized gaming as a cause of mass shootings.
“We have been very intentional in putting this campaign together to make it clear that we are not saying that video games cause gun violence,” Maxwell said. “Instead, we are using video games and the great strong community that the gamers have created to spread the message that guns make us less safe.”
The debate over gaming’s influence on gun culture first took center stage after the 1999 Columbine shooting. At the time, shifting blame onto video games was bipartisan, with figures like then-Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican from Alabama, explicitly naming video games as a cause of the massacre and then-President Bill Clinton blaming games like Doom and Mortal Kombat for making children “active participants in simulated violence.” Today, it’s more common for conservative lawmakers to scapegoat games. As recently as 2019, President Donald Trump blamed “gruesome and grisly video games” for a mass shooting in El Paso that killed 23 people. (The shooting was actually motivated by anti-immigrant hate.)
Christopher Ferguson, a professor of psychology at Stetson University who has researched the topic for over two decades, said the idea that video games cause violence “definitely is a myth.”
“With data on actual mass homicide perpetrators — school shooters, for example — we generally find that they played fewer violent video games than other same-age males, which is the opposite of what many might have hypothesized 20 years ago,” Ferguson said. “At this point, it seems clear that for school shootings and gun violence, the problem really lies elsewhere and not with violent video game playing.”
Other research suggests that moderate gaming might even have positive effects. Ofir Turel, a professor of information systems management at the University of Melbourne in Australia, analyzed data from tens of thousands of young people in the United States, looking specifically at the link between time spent playing video games and self-reported instances of bringing a gun to school within the past month.
What Turel found was surprising. Kids who played a whole lot — more than about five hours a day — showed a slightly higher risk, but so did kids who weren’t playing video games at all. For gamers in the middle, playing anywhere from less than an hour to around five hours daily, the risk was flat.
“Our theory is that video games can actually protect kids from gun violence at this level,” Turel said. “They protect kids in a sense that they keep them busy.”
This might reflect factors like adult supervision and socioeconomic conditions rather than gaming itself, Turel said.
“That tells me that something is going on with kids who play a lot or don’t play at all,” Turel said. “It could be limited parental oversight; it could be kids who cannot self-regulate because of ADHD; it could be with kids who are significantly underprivileged or too poor to have access to video games.”
Of course, that suggests that Leave Guns in the Game can’t address all of the complex factors that contribute to gun violence. But Project Unloaded is zooming in on a specific piece of the puzzle: correcting potentially dangerous misconceptions about firearms that young people may absorb through gaming culture. From that perspective, Turel said, influencing even a few individuals toward safer thinking could be valuable.
“Any effect is better than no effect,” he said. “Saving one life is good enough.”
This focus on providing accurate information and challenging myths is exactly what Patel hopes the campaign achieves.
“Ultimately, our research shows that gaming is a key way young people learn about guns, and the message that most people have learned about guns through video games and other sources, too, is that they are safer than what they actually are,” Patel told the Trace. “Our goal is to take that myth head on.”
More from The Trace:
What Generation Is Most Affected by Gun Violence?
Can Public Messaging Change How Young Americans View Guns?
CDC Teams That Study Gun Violence and Collect Data Are Decimated by Layoffs
Trump’s War on Law Firms May Imperil Gun Suits
They Served Their Time. Now They Want to Be Released From Illinois’ ‘Murderer’ Database.
Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this post included a misspelling of Shiven Patel’s name. It has been updated with the correct spelling. We apologize for the error.
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