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According to T-shirts worn at the recent Fortnite World Cup, there are now two types of families: normal families and Fortnite families.

In the eyes of fans who have fully embraced the popular video game, the competition in Queens last weekend was a realization of Fortnite ’s best qualities. It brought to life the game’s colorful and engaging digital world, paid out $30 million in total prize money and connected thousands of attendees from around the world. The World Cup’s 16-year-old winner took home $3 million in prize money .

The game is now played by nearly 250 million people around the world. We asked our readers who play it or have relatives who do to tell us how the game has affected their families.

Charlotta Ehring Buckle, a mother in Sweden, told us she and her family traveled to Queens for the tournament.

“All the kids got to realize and feel what a big family around the globe Fortnite has created,” she said.

Some of the dozens of parents who wrote to us acknowledged the game’s moneymaking potential for their young players. But many more complained that its addictive pull led their families to spend too much on in-game purchases like “skins” (characters’ often flamboyant costumes), “emotes” (cheeky dances for those characters) and “V-bucks” (currency used in the game). Many also complained the game wreaked havoc on their children’s emotions.

Below is a selection of the responses we received. They have been lightly edited.

Unexpected benefits

Whenever I ask my 14-year-old son questions about Fortnite, his face absolutely lights up. It’s made me realize that I have been too dismissive and critical of something he is passionate about.

— Denise Olsen, 52, West Orange, N.J.

It wasn’t until we as parents started to embrace [our son’s] interest in gaming and found out ourselves how it worked that we could understand the huge benefits with it. Time after time, we noticed his development in leadership, friendship, coaching, language and strategy. But above all, he built up a fantastic network of friends around the globe.

— Charlotta Ehring Buckle, 49, lives in Sölvesborg , Sweden, and has a 14-year-old son.

Fortnite has become my favorite way to unwind and catch up with my friends from law school. It is the only game to truly recreate those moments we all had as kids where we were all huddled around a Nintendo 64 trying to outplay each other.

Fortnite has given us a way to stay in touch, play and win together despite our busy lives and families.

— Zia Hassan, 30, Toronto, Ontario

The game has provided a base around which I can ask questions and be assured that I’ll get thorough responses well beyond the typical short answers to my other questions. In that way, it’s given our family something we can all talk about.

— Lance Gunkel, 40, Clive, Iowa

The lure of money

I was able to see the “good” in the game — the potential for winnings — and the mental strategy that is used in playing. I can relate to [my son] better now that I understand it and will even encourage it if I think that savings for college might be on the line!

— Kristine Murray, 52, lives Beverly, Mass., and has a 14-year-old son.

The recent tournament and the success of some young streamers seems to have raised unrealistic expectations on how easy it would be for our 12-year-old son to monetize his playing.

— Eleni Paliouras, 51, Brussels

Creating stress at home

The most alarming change I noticed was the way my children spoke to one another, not just while playing Fortnite, but in daily interactions. Their tones were more terse, more impatient. They seemed to always be speaking five decibels louder than before.

I grew so uncomfortable and unhappy with their lack of ability to speak to each other in a civil tone, that I banned the game. They were bummed, but I also felt that they were in many ways, relieved.

— Margueritte Kim, 42, lives in Portland, Ore., and has a 10-year-old and two 8-year-olds.

My 11-year-old had been playing Fortnite for about 18 months. He is a very athletic kid who plays ice hockey, lacrosse and swims, but in his spare time he became obsessed with this game.

When he played, he went from sweet and funny to frustrated and angry. It was awful watching and hearing him so upset with himself and his friends.

Two months ago, on his own, he decided to give the game up and hasn’t played since. He said he realized he wasn’t having fun. We are both much happier.

— Terri Coyle, 47, Oceanside, N.Y.

Fear of addiction

All of [my son’s] energy and time became fixated on the game, at the expense of everything else, like a drug addict hyperfocused on their next fix. We have game time limits, but he was constantly pushing for more.

When my partner and I decided to take the game away, my son did not stop crying for three weeks.

— Reed Malcolm, 52, lives in Berkeley, Calif., and has a 10-year-old son.

We set limits but the boundaries are constantly pushed. I know if I’m not around [my son] will be on there playing it. When he visits friends’ houses it becomes the sole thing they will do.

It has quickly become an addiction.

There is a social aspect of it that is positive. At least I can see that they are engaging and interacting with one another in a virtual world. They seem to be pretty good at monitoring each other within the group.

— Richard Oldfield, 42, lives in Los Angeles and has a 12-year-old son.

Parents’ struggles and dilemmas

[My son] never used to swear and now I hear him in there swearing constantly, yelling at whoever he’s playing with and saying some really terrible things.

And the money! He spends all his money on skins for the game. I’m afraid to ask how much he’s spent. I’m thinking it’s at least $2,000 over the past two years — all his own money that he received as gifts instead of birthday or Christmas presents.

I regret the day he started playing. It was his first video game ever and I thought it was cute. I wish I had locked the computer away.

I feel like a terrible mother, and I don’t know what to do. I know I’m not doing enough, but short of taking away the game entirely I don’t know how to deal with this. I’m miserable.

— Nicole Ludovici, 39, lives in North Syracuse, N.Y., and has a 14-year-old son.

My 10-year-old was obsessed with asking us for V-Bucks. The 6-year-old would get mad that the 10-year-old would get more time playing. Then he’d get mad when he was killed quickly.

The emotions escalated and we stopped the game.

In hindsight, they’re probably too young for Fortnite, but so many of their peers were playing the game that if we didn’t give them a chance, they’d be left out of something that so many kids had bonded over.

— Jennifer Connealy, 35, Missouri Valley, Iowa

Do you or your relatives play Fortnite? Tell us in the comments how the game has affected your family.

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A promising new contender has arrived in a crowded pharmaceutical field. Joining the ranks of Ambien, Lunesta, Sonata and other prescription lullaby drugs is “Lestat,” the musical sleeping pill that opened last night at the Palace Theater.

Adapted from Anne Rice’s cult novels “The Vampire Chronicles,” and featuring songs by Elton John and Bernie Taupin, this portrait of blood suckers in existential crisis gives resounding credence to the legend that vampires are masters of hypnosis. Dare to look upon “Lestat” and keep your eyelids from growing heavier and heavier and heavier.

Remember when the fiends with the fangs were fun? In the late 1970’s Frank Langella had ’em swooning in the aisles as the fatally erotic title character of “Dracula.” But recently bat boys have been unable to get much respect from Broadway audiences.

Somewhere along the way it was decided that vampires were meant to sing and dance, leading to a series of undignified stage portrayals that should have had the Undead Anti-Defamation League up in arms (or wings) long ago.

“Lestat,” the maiden Broadway production of Warner Brothers Theater Ventures, is the third vampire musical to open in the last few years, and it seems unlikely to break the solemn curse that has plagued the genre. Directed by Robert Jess Roth from a book by Linda Woolverton, the show admittedly has higher aspirations and (marginally) higher production values than the kitschy “Dance of the Vampires” (2002) and the leaden “Dracula: The Musical” (2004), both major-league flops.

Set in France and New Orleans (with a few exotic road trips) in the 18th and 19th centuries, “Lestat” makes a point of sending up the archetypal vampire myth, with a melodramatic play-within-a-play (performed by a ragtag Parisian theater troupe) seemingly inspired by the Bram Stoker novel that introduced Count Dracula.

The characters in “Lestat,” you see, don’t do silly things like turn into bats. They are serious, Dostoyevskyan creatures who ponder the nature of good and evil and the torture of human — all right, make that inhuman — solitude.

Such concerns do not stop them from sounding or looking like the stiff, sub-Heathcliffian figures of period romance novels (even if they don’t approach the eye-candy heights of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in the Warner Brothers film of Ms. Rice’s “Interview With the Vampire”). Hugh Panaro, in the title role, resembles a slimmed-down, foppish Fabio, the onetime top paperback cover model for such fare. And there is plenty of dialogue to match. “Whatever happened out there with the wolves has changed you, Lestat.” Or: “I will never find solace! She was my solace! She stood between me and the abyss!”

Ms. Rice’s novels can be similarly hokey. But the prose is steeped in an unwavering, baroque musicality that carries readers along despite themselves. “Lestat,” which vacillates feebly between low tragedy and lower camp, has nothing like that self-assurance. The pulpy and mostly interchangeable songs by Sir Elton and Mr. Taupin, one of the most successful top-40 teams of all time (“Your Song,” “Rocket Man”), are rarely the requisite purple but instead a synthetic shade of mauve.

The musical staging by Matt West consists of halfhearted pastiches, which include a vampire mythology number that bizarrely reworks Jerome Robbins’s “Small House of Uncle Thomas” ballet in “The King and I.” Derek McLane’s sets are surprisingly minimal, with the most arresting effects generated by the light show that occurs anytime a new vampire is created. (The lighting is by Kenneth Posner, with “visual concept design” by Dave McKean.)

As for the actors, they mostly tend to make you think that vampires are a petulant lot, always complaining in sing-song voices about how lonely they are and what a drag it is to live forever. Theatergoers who want to resist the soporific spell of this whinefest may possibly find amusement (or indignation) in dissecting “Lestat” as an old-fashioned allegory of homosexuality as a life-warping affliction.

“Lestat” brings to mind a fancy-dress version of “The Boys in the Band,” Mart Crowley’s landmark play about the miseries of being gay. Here again is a set of expensively attired men who, when they aren’t on the prowl for a luscious new conquest, lament the all-consuming urges that have turned them into outcasts.

Louis (Jim Stanek, who in his 19th-century wig looks like the writer Fran Lebowitz), Lestat’s New Orleans housemate, sings:

I don’t think I can take another night

Of these instincts that I fightThis overwhelming dread

Of feeling damned inside.

And the evil Parisian vampire Armand, played by Drew Sarich as a sustained hissy fit, is a first cousin to Harold, the most viperish and self-loathing of the characters in Mr. Crowley’s play.

And consider Lestat’s relationships with his disapproving father (hates him) and his doting mother (loves, loves, loves her). He so adores his mom, a marquise (played by the ever-game power balladeer Carolee Carmello), that he makes her a vampire too, giving her a chance to dress up like one of the boys, join the hunt and become the undead’s answer to Auntie Mame.

At least the leading female vampires are livelier than their male counterparts. The closest “Lestat” comes to so-bad-it’s-good camp is in a subplot that might be called “Claudia Has Two Daddies.” Claudia is the little orphan girl brought home as a peace offering to the sulking Louis by Lestat, who turns her into a vampire after finding her destitute on the streets of New Orleans.

As portrayed by Allison Fischer, Claudia is a high-decibel version of Patty McCormack in “The Bad Seed,” all sweetness, light and lethal bite. She provides the show’s high-low point when she throws a musical temper tantrum after being reprimanded for killing her tutor. In a voice to bring down the walls of Jericho, she sings:

Look at you, you disapprove

Like two fussy mothers.Who are you to criticize

The habits of another?

The song’s title, repeated imperiously throughout the lyrics, is “I Want More.” So do we, little Claudia. But this show isn’t the place to find it.

Lestat

Based on “The Vampire Chronicles” by Anne Rice; music by Elton John; lyrics by Bernie Taupin; book by Linda Woolverton; musical staging by Matt West; directed by Robert Jess Roth. Sets by Derek McLane; costumes by Susan Hilferty; lighting by Kenneth Posner; sound by Jonathan Deans; visual concept design, Dave McKean; wig and hair design, Tom Watson; makeup design, Angelina Avallone; fight director, Rick Sordelet; projections coordinator, Howard Werner; musical supervisor, Guy Babylon; orchestrations, Steve Margoshes and Mr. Babylon; music direction, incidental music and additional vocal arrangements, Brad Haak; music coordinator, John Miller; vocal arrangements, Todd Ellison; production stage manager, Bonnie L. Becker; associate director, Sam Scalamoni; associate scenic design, Bryan Johnson; general management, Alan Wasser Associates, Allan Williams; technical supervisor, Juniper Street Productions. Presented by Warner Brothers Theater Ventures. At the Palace Theater, 1564 Broadway, at 47th Street, (212) 307-4100. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.

WITH: Hugh Panaro (Lestat), Carolee Carmello (Gabrielle), Drew Sarich (Armand), Jim Stanek (Louis), Roderick Hill (Nicolas), Michael Genet (Marius), Allison Fischer (Claudia), Joseph Dellger (Magnus), Will Swenson, (Marquis and Laurent), Nikki Renée Daniels (Eleni) and Megan Reinking (Beautiful Woman).