Slashdot Mirror
Video Game Addiction Saves Lives
EzRag writes "Here's a nice bit about a guy who saved a household of people from a fire, all thanks to his late-night video game addiction. Does this mean I can count all my hours of playing Chron X as community service work?"
Am I the only one who expected the person to have played something like FF3 where one of the parts of the game is to save a kid in a burning building?
Comeon, he just happened to be awake due to video games. I wouldn't say that the video game addiction itself saved the lives.
Plus, it would have been a lot cooler had he ran in and held up the building Sabin style while some other girl ran around and saved everyone.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
Pah, that's not addiction.
Addiction to a game is when you notice a fire and think "well, just play a little more, then I'll take care of it..."
Dad/Mom/Girl/Boyfriend: Were you up late last night playing video games again?
Me: Oh come on, I'm just trying to protect you....
I have a good friend of mine who has a really horrid family life. Father works in the north pole for some government satelite project and is only home 2 weeks out of the year, every year. When he is home he dissappears for the majority of those two weeks, drinks constantly, cheats on his wife, and gambles all his money away in Vegas.
My friends mom is a wreck because of this, she doesn't trust any of his friends, and right now they aren't making enough money to pay for their house, meaning my friend may have to leave school, forfeiting his education to get a job and pay the bills.
However, with all this drama at home he is one of the most easy going, light hearted guys I know. I blame this all on his video gaming habits. I'm thoroughly convinced that if he weren't able to dive into alternate lives through his PC monitor every night for the majority of his life, he would be angry, depressed, and probably would have snapped and killed someone by now.
Maybe my explanation doesn't paint the appropriate picture, but you get the idea. In the end, games are also a great way of dealing with stress in the real world, and can definitely benefit those in need of some vacation from reality.
...some guy is discovered by his mom in his basement. Mom says, "Holy Crap, we buried him 5 years ago, and low-and-behold, he was just fragging in the basement all that time."
In teh event of an actual emergency this space might provide useful information.
So this guy loses his home and all his posessions and...
The video game company - Mystic Entertainment of Fairfax, Va. - sent Machado seven T-shirts and a few hats after hearing about his family's misfortune.
Gee, thanks! So now they have no home, no posessions and they all look like assholes!
All things in moderation; including moderation
"I torched my home for DAoC, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt"
It is rediculous to call that guy a game addict by any stretch of the imagination (according to the article). When you consider the thousands of people, myself included, who load SWG or EQ or something as soon as they get home and play into the wee hours of the morning, nine hours or less a week is nothing. I'm quite sure I'll play more than nine hours of SWG tomorrow. I might expect this kinda crap from CNN but I thought we knew better on /.
This is of course assuming he told the truth about how much he plays.
Trust Your Technolust
Ohh that's nice.. "We are very sorry your house burned down, would you please advertise our video game?"
Hrrm... I usually just sign my name.
Late last night in the wee hours of the morning, a fire broke out in a suburban home. Resident nerd Johnny was able to alert the other people in the house because he was up late having a foursome with three models. This proves that nerds should more often have sex with models. The government, backed by the fire department is implementing a program to keep models having sex with nerds. The goal of the scheme is to have a foursome in every household every night. More on this in tomorrows news. Right now I have to be getting home to check for fires. This was reporter Seedy McPimp. Thank you and goodnight.
Karma: -2^0.5 . Mainly due to the imbibing of dihydrogen monoxide
working your way in high school is a tough thing to do, i did it and barely graduated- but it beats working INSTEAD of high school. If he has any hope of making his life better over the next three years, dropping out of school is one of the worst things to do. It will be hard for him to stop gaming to work nights; he'll need to make some hard decisions no matter how this goes.
Back on topic; i think that i have to agree that this guy's gaming addiction didn't save them- he saved them in spite of the gaming addiction. The fact that he had a late night sleep pattern was a factor, but it could have been from any late night activity. If he'd been an astronomy student, for example, he would have noticed the light from the fire very quickly. If he'd been reading he would have been awake, too. Does anybody else see the potential for a Sims: Catastrophe game in this? watch your sims deal with hurricanes, tornadoe, fires, carjackings, and ebola...
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
>Video game addition saves lives
Please, it does not save lives.
That like saying cheap alarms clocks save lives because once my alarm didn't go off, so I missed the plane that crashed.
Silly.
> He said the only possessions that he could
> salvage from his home were "just the clothes on
> my back."
Oh my God! His DAoC artefacts got burned as well? Geeze, these RPGs are getting realistic... I'm fireproofing my +4 Mjollnir!
Sentimentality is merely the Bank Holiday of cynicism.
- Oscar Wilde
Weeee... Chron X got Slashdotted! Here's another player cum regular reader of Slashdot of this barely-advertised-in-this-era game reporting in.
Wow- I had no idea that CX was still going since being abandoned by genetic anomolies...
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws. -Plato
Last year I was up all night playing games as that guy was, then at 5:30 am about 5 minutes after I went to bed I noticed the roof was on fire. Got my family out but lost everything. So it might be the same sort of thing as the situation you said but its still saving lives.
I lived on a groundfloor suite during College. And a friend of ours had become addicted to NetHack and came over to play all the time.
Well, one afternoon after everyone is finally awake up (he's still playing) we notice that one of the window screens is broken, and the Lava Lamp has is out on the sidewalk, broken (it was a few feet away from the window, as if someone tried to steal it, but burnt themselves on the hot-lava).
So, we ask our friend what happened, as he'd been awake the whole time. He had heard people talking nearby, heard someone scream and something break, but didn't bother to get up or anything...
glad out place wasn't burning down.
...back in 1986.
I was playing videogames (first it was the Colecovision/Adam baseball game with a friend, then I switched over to Ultima IV on the Commodore 64 when he left). When I finally went to bed I smelled smoke. I went downstairs and found an apartment on fire (a burglar had apparently set it on fire to cover his robbery). Then I called the fire department and woke up the rest of the people in the building (which turns out to be kinda hard to do at 3a.m., but the 911 operator gave me some tips).
It never once occurred to me to credit the videogames. I guess that's because we were so backwards in the '80s. We didn't know we needed to come up with excuses for our addictions.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
The video game company - Mystic Entertainment of Fairfax, Va. - sent Machado seven T-shirts and a few hats after hearing about his family's misfortune.
At least he'll be clothed when he goes to the nearest Internet cafe to get his fix.
Pretty funny that they gave the guy's former and current address. What the fuck were they thinking?
I always thought /. was a community, despite the bickering and good natured platform loyalties.... flame on, but this is a story about a fellow gamer who has apparently lost everything... like being cloned without any insurance, losing all possessions... (in reality he may have had a very good home insurance policy).
/. post to the original media outlet with a declaration of intent to aid he and his family... hopefully via small donations to a paypal account... defaulting to me sending a check for a hundred bucks to this guy to help out. Hopefully he doesn't need it, but if he does I can't think of a better use for a hundred bucks I'd probaby just spend on coffee or alcohol over the next month. Anyone else with disposable income they could lend. Don't worry, there's no oblgation to help out next time... seriously you don't have to bail out everyone who ever had an accident/misfortune, just think about helping every once in a while.
In any case I read the article and decided to foward a link to the
Text of submission:
"Video fix saved resident in fire
By Dan Murphy / For the Journal
Thursday, August 14, 2003"
I would like to help this individual. If you could contact Richard Machado and let him know that his plight has been broadcast on "Slashdot.org" ( http://slashdot.org) a premiere technologists news site and that all of the readers would be interested in finding out about how they can individually help he and his family through their tough times... please forward advice on how to set up a PayPal account or similar so that we his peers can contribute a dollar, ten or a hundred as our situation merits to helping he and his family.
In addition please advise Slashdot.org(part of the RedHat network) separately of the ROI they will receive for adding a new category... 'Community Service' which of course people can 'uncheck' from their homepage if they don't want to see it.
If there is no response from the Slashdot community, I would appreciate if you could forward my email to Richard Machado. I would like to help..
Sincerely,
X. XXXXXXXX
Irvine CA
"
p.s
I x'ed out my name for this post... if the email gets publicity
I will welcome the exposure. Til then it's YROL.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
...they were thinking you might want to drop him a card, stop by and visit, see if he needed a hand. That you might want to submit his story to /. did not occur to them.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
So you spotted an apartment fire, calmly reported it to 911, then patiently got everybody out of the building. Somebody has to point out that this counts as major heroism which probably saved a life or two. Or were you just expressing your Avatar?