It was getting late in Tomato Town. The storm was closing in, and meteors pelted the ground. Gizzard Lizard had made his way there after plundering the sparsely populated barns and domiciles of Anarchy Acres, then by avoiding the Wailing Woods and keeping the storm just off to his left. He spied an enemy combatant on high ground, who appeared to have a sniper’s rifle. In a hollow below the sniper’s perch was an abandoned pizzeria, with a giant rotating sign in the shape of a tomato. Gizzard Lizard, who had quickly built himself a redoubt of salvaged beams, said, “I think I’m going to attack. That’s one of my main issues: I need to start being more aggressive.” He ran out into the open, pausing before a thick shrub. “This is actually a really good bush. I could bush-camp. But naw, that’s what noobs do.”

Two men enter, one man leaves: the fighters closed in on each other. In the video game Fortnite Battle Royale, the late-game phase is typically the most frenetic and exciting. Suddenly, the sniper launched himself into a nearby field and began attacking. Gizzard Lizard hastily threw up another port-a-fort, amid a hail of enemy fire. The goal is always to get, or make, the high ground.

A moment later, Gizzard Lizard was dead—killed by a grenade. Afterward, he replayed the ending, from various vantages, to analyze what had gone wrong. To be so close to winning and yet come up short—it was frustrating and tantalizing. One wants to go again. The urge is strong. But it was time for my son to do his homework.

I spent more time as a kid than I care to remember watching other kids play video games. Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong. Usually, my friends, over my objections, preferred this to playing ball—or to other popular, if less edifying, neighborhood pursuits, such as tearing hood ornaments off parked cars. Every so often, I played, too, but I was a spaz. Insert quarter, game over. Once gaming moved into dorms and apartments—Nintendo, Sega—I learned that I could just leave. But sometimes I didn’t. I admired the feat of divided attention, the knack that some guys (and it was always guys) seemed to have for staying alive, both in the game and in the battle of wits on the couch, as though they were both playing a sport and doing “SportsCenter” at the same time.

I thought of this the other day when a friend described watching a group of eighth-grade boys and girls (among them his son) hanging around his apartment playing, but mostly watching others play, Fortnite. One boy was playing on a large TV screen, with a PlayStation 4 console. The other boys were on their phones, either playing or watching a professional gamer’s live stream. And the girls were playing or watching on their own phones, or looking over the shoulders of the boys. One of the girls told my friend, “It’s fun to see the boys get mad when they lose.” No one said much. What patter there was—l’esprit du divan—came from the kids’ little screens, in the form of the pro gamer’s mordant narration as he vanquished his opponents.

Fortnite, for anyone not a teen-ager or a parent or educator of teens, is the third-person shooter game that has taken over the hearts and minds—and the time, both discretionary and otherwise—of adolescent and collegiate America. Released last September, it is right now by many measures the most popular video game in the world. At times, there have been more than three million people playing it at once. It has been downloaded an estimated sixty million times. (The game, available on PC, Mac, Xbox, PS4, and mobile devices, is—crucially—free, but many players pay for additional, cosmetic features, including costumes known as “skins.”) In terms of fervor, compulsive behavior, and parental noncomprehension, the Fortnite craze has elements of Beatlemania, the opioid crisis, and the ingestion of Tide Pods. Parents speak of it as an addiction and swap tales of plunging grades and brazen screen-time abuse: under the desk at school, at a memorial service, in the bathroom at 4 A.M. They beg one another for solutions. A friend sent me a video he’d taken one afternoon while trying to stop his son from playing; there was a time when repeatedly calling one’s father a fucking asshole would have led to big trouble in Tomato Town. In our household, the big threat is gamer rehab in South Korea.

Game fads come and go: Rubik’s Cube, Dungeons & Dragons, Angry Birds, Minecraft, Clash of Clans, Pokémon Go. What people seem to agree on, whether they’re seasoned gamers or dorky dads, is that there’s something new emerging around Fortnite, a kind of mass social gathering, open to a much wider array of people than the games that came before. Its relative lack of wickedness—it seems to be mostly free of the misogyny and racism that afflict many other games and gaming communities—makes it more palatable to a broader audience, and this appeal both ameliorates and augments its addictive power. (The game, in its basic mode, randomly assigns players’ skins, which can be of any gender or race.) Widespread anecdotal evidence suggests that girls are playing in vast numbers, both with and without boys. There are, and probably ever shall be, some gamer geeks who gripe at such newcomers, just as they gripe when there are no newcomers at all.

A friend whose thirteen-year-old son is deep down the rabbit hole likened the Fortnite phenomenon to the Pump House Gang, the crew of ne’er-do-well teen surfers in La Jolla whom Tom Wolfe happened upon in the early nineteen-sixties. Instead of a clubhouse on the beach, there’s a virtual global juvenile hall, where kids gather, invent an argot, adopt alter egos, and shoot one another down. Wolfe’s Pump House kids went on beer-soaked outings they called “destructos,” in which they would, at local farmers’ behest, demolish abandoned barns. Now it’s Juul-sneaking little homebodies demolishing virtual walls and houses with imaginary pickaxes. Young people everywhere are swinging away at their world, tearing it down to survive—creative destruction, of a kind.

Shall I explain the game? I have to, I’m afraid, even though describing video games is a little like recounting dreams. A hundred players are dropped onto an island—from a flying school bus—and fight one another to the death. The winner is the last one standing. (You can pair up or form a squad, too.) This is what is meant by Battle Royale. (The original version of Fortnite, introduced last July, for forty dollars, wasn’t fight to the death; it is the new iteration that has caught fire.) A storm encroaches, gradually forcing combatants into an ever-shrinking area, where they must kill or be killed. Along the way, you seek out caches of weapons, armor, and healables, while also collecting building materials by breaking down existing structures. Hasty fabrication (of ramps, forts, and towers) is an essential aspect of the game, and this is why it is commonly described as a cross between Minecraft and the Hunger Games—and why aggrieved parents are able to tell themselves that it is constructive.