Adolescents’ Attitudes towards the Development of Teamplay Abilities in Fortnite

Abstract

With a growing number of adolescents that play video games, a more nuanced perspective from both a societal and scientific point of view is necessary to accurately understand gaming, its influence, and the attitudes held toward it. This paper focuses on a digital learning perspective of adolescents playing Fortnite, specifically their attitude of development of two skills - second language and cooperation. Fortnite facilitates an informal digital environment in which players globally can interact with each other and are encouraged to work together, leading to possible opportunities to develop second language development and cooperation skills. A qualitative design was employed, using thematic analysis to analyze 15 semi-structured interviews with adolescents that play Fortnite. The results showed that language development within Fortnite was experienced by participants when working together and speaking with other players that spoke English. Results for cooperation were limited to implications, as respondents found the concept of ‘development of cooperation’ to be too vague. In general, it can be concluded that the partaking adolescents felt they developed teamplay abilities in playing Fortnite, although the development of English was understood better than that of cooperation. This could be explained through the concept of respectively hard- and soft-skills. Future research should gather more participants, but could also employ longitudinal, quantitative designs to measure an actual differences in skills to test whether popular games like Fortnite actually have an influence on developing skills.