The latest installment of the popular video game Fortnite: Battle Royale is seeing children drop out of social activities like playing sport.
Behavioural specialists say that some children are even battling gaming addiction as a result from constantly playing the game.
Michael Rich, a director of the Clinic for Interactive Media and Internet Disorders at Boston Children's Hospital, told the Boston Globe about its impact.
'They are not sleeping. They are not going to school. They are dropping out of social activities. A lot of kids have stopped playing sports so they can do this,' he said.
'We have one kid who destroyed the family car because he thought his parents had locked his device inside,' Mr Rich said. 'He took a hammer to the windshield.'
His account is just one of many that describe an obsession so intense that kids are seeing doctors and therapists to break the game's hold over their children.
In some cases teenagers are losing so much weight because they refuse to stop playing to eat that doctors initially think they have a physical disease.
'One of the parents will get to the point of almost considering a divorce,' Rich Domenico, a therapist with LiveWell Therapy Associates, in the Back Bay told the publication.
'It's similar to working with parents who have a child addicted to drugs.'