Where focus goes...

​If you’re a parent, chances are you’ve heard about Fortnite, been nagged about ‘Battle Passes’ and they haven’t stopped talking about the thing!
The free multiplayer has been available since July 2017 on both Windows and MAC as well as Xbox One, Playstation 4 and more recently the Nintendo Switch.  The more popular ‘Battle Royale’ version puts 100 different players onto a big island in a solo mode, duo or a squad of 4 to battle it out for survival until there is one winner! 
The bright colourful cartoon-like graphics have prevented a blood-fest that some shooters have given us over the years and this helps attract the younger gamer although its rated for mild violence.

With over 40 million downloads of this game, its safe to safe that the creator, Epic Games are onto a huge winner and although the game is free to download, it’s the in-game purchases that have let the creators have a holiday or two in the sun!

Like anything, the hype will begin to drop and recently with the arrival of ‘Apex Legends’, another free multiplayer battle royale adventure, the numbers may have taken a dip with the Fortnite servers.  As anything ages, the constant new content is key to keeping the fan base coming back, Grand Theft Auto 5 is an example that is in another league.  The game will be 6 years old later this year, but is still one of the most played online games across all formats.

So why are we still talking about games here?  As mentioned before, Fortnite possibly had a dip in active players and gave an incentive to all its players within the challenges that are set week by week/ by season.  ‘Complete 13 of the Overtime challenges to win a free Season 8 Battle Pass’, it’s a sure winner to have any of those Fortnite players that may have disappeared for a bit to come back and play/ make in-game purchases.  How much is this worth then?  The Battle Pass itself costs 1,000 V-Bucks (the in game currency) which is around £7.99, but the money that can be made by the other in game purchases that can be made is insane!  An outfit (or skin as the kids call them) can cost 1,500 V-Bucks which when you work out is around £12 in real money terms, different gliders can be bought as well different harvesting tools (which you start with), none of these things do anything different, just different designs!  Again, the latter two would be worth around £4 each!  Its reported that Fortnite made over £1.8bn in 2018 alone, you don’t need me to explain why its so important to keep players coming back!

Getting back to the subject, my growing-up-too-fast little girl, Kacey, wanted to complete the challenges to win a free Battle Pass and aside from not using the V-Bucks already on her account, I saw this as something that could be done.. and why not!
As a disclaimer here, I’ve tried playing Fortnite and can not get into it at all, I’ll stick to Grand Theft Auto but I do understand how it works and much rather just watch someone hacking down trees with a pickaxe!

So how did we manage to smash the challenges and end up doing 15 or so instead?  Well, the answer is simple and it was ‘focus’.  “Where focus goes, energy flows!”

In a rare moment where an almost near teenager (how did she get to this age so quick?) actually listened to some gaming advice, there was a bit of a change in her approach to playing each game.  Instead of trying to do part of a challenge like search a treasure chest in one place and then play until that character was killed, I helped install the mindset that each game played was to do one or two challenges and quit the game and start a new one.

Slowly, after a few hours of jumping out of the flying party bus and hacking away at trees, we had 12 challenges completed and hallelujah we unlocked the next season’s battle pass!
Probably the most rewarding part for me was that after the few hours on that Friday night and Saturday morning, the focus that was spent on looking at what the challenges were, what had to be done to complete them and then finally the happiness and fulfilment that Kacey had on her face was well worth the time.  It was rewarding to see that despite the time it took, the plan was stuck to, the idea that you can start a game, do part of a challenge and then just quit that game to help her cause was something I hadn’t really seen before in her approach with anything.  By the end of that weekend, there were 15 challenges completed, more than what was needed but again, take an approach, run with it and smash it!

The message is focus and this is something that you do every single day with so many different things without even thinking about it.  If you have a project at work, you focus on it and the project moves along.  The cupboards at home are empty so you focus on that and go shopping, if you didn’t, what would you eat, you can’t have a takeaway every night can you!?  Even when you need to brush your teeth before bed, if you do of course, you still need to focus some of your time and energy to be able to do it.  Whatever it is you want to do, plan what you want, how you will do it, stick to your plan unless it fails a little and change it to suit the mission and you’ll be surprised at how far you will get!

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