“Fortnite Battle Royale” is the newest gaming craze that has been sweeping the country and taking over the lives of the nation’s youth.

This player vs. player battle, where all combatants fight until one person or team remains standing, is now the most popular game in the battle royale gaming genre. The champion wins bragging rights and enhanced stats.

The entire idea behind the game is fairly callous, as the player is dropped in a world where the object is to hunt down and murder other players.

In terms of visuals, the game isn’t graphic at all. The most gruesome visual that you’ll ever see in the game is someone shooting another person or blowing them up. When a player dies in the game, there’s no blood and guts; the deceased character simply lies on the ground motionless until a craft hovers over them and “takes away the body.” The design of the characters, places and objects in this game is relatively elementary as it doesn’t include any gore or glamorize the murder of another person.

However, this sanitization of violence isn’t necessarily beneficial because it’s downplaying the aggressive actions that the players are taking against each other and desensitizing the players to them.

The whole reason why developers made the graphics less gory was to appeal to younger audiences. The game is technically supposed to be for teen audiences, but let’s be real, kids in elementary school are definitely playing it every day.

“Fortnite Battle Royale” also normalizes violence. Nowadays when you walk through the halls, you might hear kids talking about how many people they killed in the game last night or how they finished in the top five; but is this really something that people should be bragging about?

By boasting about the number of kills you’ve tallied, you might be showing off your skills and your gaming prowess, but you’re also bragging about killing other people. It may just be a digital game where actual people aren’t dying, but think about it.

On Wednesday, members of our school community participated in an event to protest the recent gun violence that we’ve had in society, particularly the shootings that have filled our schools. And yet, some of us will go home and play a game that normalizes and trivializes gun violence.