A law firm in Montreal, Canada, is preparing a class-action lawsuit against Epic Games for “knowingly” making the game Fortnite addictive.
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According to CBC, the Canadian law firm Calex Légal is representing the parents of two children 10 and 15. The lawsuit alleges that the playing the game releases dopamine in a manner similar to cocaine, which can lead to a chemical addiction.
The lawsuit also alleges that the developer, Epic Games, intentionally made the game addictive.
"Epic Games, when they created Fortnite, for years and years, hired psychologists — they really dug into the human brain and they really made the effort to make it as addictive as possible," Alessandra Esposito Chartrand, an attorney with Calex Légal, told CBC.
Chartrand said that the company should be forthcoming with the risks associated with the game.
"In our case, the two parents that came forward and told, 'If we knew it was so addictive it would ruin our child's life, we would never have let them start playing Fortnite or we would have monitored it a lot more closely,'" Chartrand told CBC.
In the 38-page request, it notes that in 2018 the World Health Organization designated "gaming disorder" as a mental health condition.
Fortnite is free to download and is constantly updating with new features. Each game only lasts 20 minutes if you don’t get eliminated, so players loop in again and again, making it easy to play for long stretches.