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Blizzard Sued for Death of Gamer
Somatic writes "In the latest saga over online gaming addiction in China, the parents of a 13-year-old Tianjin boy are suing the makers of World of Warcraft, blaming the game for the death of their son, according to the Chinese news agency Xinhua. The parents filed a suit against Blizzard Entertainment on Wednesday, saying their son jumped to his death while reenacting a scene from the game, the report said. The parents are backed by the anti-Internet addiction advocate Zhang Chunliang. Mr. Chunliang has spoken to 63 parents whose children have allegedly suffered from online gaming addiction and plans to file a class-action suit, according to the report."
Doom encourages two high schoolers to go suicidal and massacre kids at a school, and all we hear is a public outcry on why violent games are bad. A kid playing WoW dies and Blizzard gets sued? What's the world coming to?
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
maybe they should jump on the bandwagon and print safety labels on game boxes, like they put on coffee cups (hot coffe in your lap whilke driving = bad) and microwaves (don't dry your cat in them)!
or they just listened to him: http://www.bash.org/?4753
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/20/142320 1&threshold=-1&tid=95
Our lawyer friend Jack from the USA would use this case in China as "proof" that video games are killing children. The sad truth is that some children are incapable of distinguishing fantasy from reality, and should not be playing video games. Darwin's theory takes over if they see something they shouldn't be doing, because whatever is wrong with their brain takes over and puts fiction to life. The results are enough to stir up other kooks like Jack Thompson.
Ban parents who buy video games for mentally challenged children! Don't ban video games!
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
From TFA:
"The Chinese government has already said it plans to restrict gamers to three hours of consecutive play, using a "fatigue technique" in games. After three hours of play, the online game would lose some player power, and after five hours, the player would lose most power. After that, there would be a delay of five hours before the game could be accessed to its full capacity."
I'd be curious to find out if this proposal might actually enhance gameplay. This could be the first good thing to come out of China's Government... you'd be forced to spend the time you have to play doing worthwhile things that are fun instead of being able to 'grind' players up the rankings...
On the other hand if this was forced on the Game Developers and Distributors legally, ie. they have to build it in to their system... it would set a very bad precedent for all products of all types.... think cars and driving, or cellphones or TV viewing. Imagine a curfew system for using anything electronic, where you can only use it during preset times and for pre-approved purposes (well I guess you don't have to imagine it, just move to China and try using the internet). China's attempt to regulate the people's behavior is going to backlash in a major way soon, IMHO. They want all the benefits of a free market but all the control of a closed market... can't have it both ways...
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
And lo-and-behold the ESRB warns of "Blood, Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol, and Violence"/T for Teen... so I guess my 15 month old won't be playing - but she clearly has more sense than their 13yo child: she's terrified of heights.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
See a normal person would just get annoyed and stop playing ... :-)
Sorry, but "game lengtheners" [a technique not limited to RPGs] are really annoying and drive me to stop playing a game [or at least the way intended].
A "game lengthener" is a device in a game [e.g. "strategy"] that doesn't add to the story line but takes a long time to complete [usually because you have to redo the challenge over and over and over]. GTA is famous for those with timed missions were your margin of error can be as short as a matter of SECONDS in a mission that can last minutes.
Most puzzle type games use these as well. You can tell you've been had when either you realize you're on a mission for the 18th time or you finish the game in a weekend and go "that's all?" In the case of GTA I rarely do missions and mostly just drive around blowing shit up [and finding bugs in the engine]. The missions are mostly retarded anyways "pick this up, blow that up, catch this guy who is 84 miles away".
In games like WoW where you have to "gain EXP" to level up and some missions clearly require high levels it's just a matter of getting you hooked to play more and more and eventually pay Blizzard more monthly fees.
Personally if I were to sit down to "power up" something it would be my mind by reading more books not my imaginary character on a game server...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Actually, I think this whole lawsuit is China's shield for another crackdown on internet usage. China wants to censor their internet as much as possible. If they can use "think about the children" as an excuse this lawsuit could be, and probably will be, used in the service of propaganda.
Perhaps my 2nd grade orchestra teacher is liable for my addiction to playing musical instruments? I can't even get the damn thoughts out of my head - whether I'm at work, at home watching TV, or suddenly awake in the middle of the night, I am constantly thinking (usually way in the back of my mind) about music and playing music. Oh the mental anguish!
I'm not disagreeing with your premise about these games. They are addictive. One in particular had a hold of me for several years, but I finally shook it. However, I can't fathom how people can hold the makers of these things liable for a person's irresponsible addictive behavior. What are they supposed to do? Produce a successful product, but not too successful? It reminds me of the medieval Catholic church decree that it was sinful to make too much profit. (Was it 10%?) Any profits you make over that must be turned over to the church, else you're going straight to hell. Is that what we're suggesting with video games and cigarettes? Why not oil companies, tv shows, and professional athletes/sports teams?
These lawsuits might be successful on an individual scale where specific facts can be considered, but in the broader scheme of things, they're preposterous. If I were a game developer, I would specifically design my online games that require a monthly subscription fee to be as addictive as possible.
I would compare this case more to suing gun manufacturers than to suing tobacco companies. In my opinion, the tobacco lawsuits were actually reasonable: People were claiming the tobacco companies actively suppressed research into the addictive and carcinogenic nature of tobacco; thus, people bought the product, got addicted, and came down with cancer, all the while thinking what they were doing was reasonable safe. Thus, there were ample grounds for a lawsuit.
This case, however, is a lot more like the nonsense over suing gun makers for what criminals do with them, suing bars over deaths caused by drunken drivers, &c. -- someone's just looking to place blame on a tangentially-connected, and -- coincidentally, I'm sure -- well-monied third party.
Liberty in your lifetime
I call B.S. This is a convenient story that people that are no longer kids like to tell themselves. I'd bet if you reflected on your entire life, jumping from a tree pretending you were He-Man probably wouldn't make your top 25 of all time stupid things you have done. If you were to make a top 25 list, probabilities would have that most of these happened while you were an adult.
I used to do flips off my roof into a pool. Stupid? Yeah. Top 25 stupid? Probably not. Kids are testing boundries - and there is inherent risk in doing so. Adults more frequently do stupid things out of complacency. There's a reason why people take notice of a kid jumping off a tree and killing themselves. There's also a reason why people don't think twice about people that kill themselves (or worse, another) because they were driving and talking on the cell phone - or some other "normal" activity. Which do you think is more common?
I guess I'll have to wait for the class action law suit of Child Services vs. the parents for letting their children endanger themselves. And if I think more about it, the parents in both law suits did all the work.
I am surprised no typical /. conspiracy theorists did not bring that up.
Would you consider tha chance that the kid was totally normal, and simply fell out of the window? Than the parents are just trying to make a buck ?
OR:
How did the parents know that he was "re-enacting" a scene from the game? Were THEY playing the game and the kid just watched?
Now if they saw or played the game, they should have realised that it was dangerous and just forbid the kid to play it. I have motorbikes, quads, drill machines and whatever else dangerous stuff, if I know it is dangerous I do not let my kid play with it, simple like that. If I do fail so it is my responsibility.
This is just another retarded case of let's blame games practice.
How many people sued the makers of superman ? Or mary poppins? I mean I knew a kid who broke both her arms trying to parachute with an umrella. She landed in front of our garage entrance in fact. She was stupid but not stupid enought to make 1st jump from the 3rd floor, and the first floor jump did not kill her.
Now I ask again: why not sue movies? I mean how many kids movies feature people flying, shooting, killing. Or how many homes are without a channel blovking device with password control for non-suitable content?
It is a joke. Kids see more violence on a day staying home and watching TV that I can experience playing grand theft auto for hours.
Personally, I approve of the controls on selling violent games to minors.
[...]
Do we really want liability for companies who make violent movies?
There's a thing about US cartoons that has been annoying me for years.
There seems to be a law that no real guns should ever be shown in kid's show (remember how G.I. Joe and Cobra used to shoot lasers out of their M16s and AK47s?), that a hero on a motorcycle shoud ALWAYS wear a helmet (wolverine with a helmet, or worse, spiderman, gets on a hog, pulls a helmet out of his ass, puts it on, and when he jumps off the bike to start freefalling off tall buildings while being shot at with heat seeking missiles, THEN he takes off the helmet!), or the worse: THE WORST of all: No consequences. Ever.
When G.I. Joe's army is shooting at Cobra's army, from 15 feet away, with automatic weapons, NO ONE EVER GETS HURT.
This is dangerous. Much more dangerous than watching violence: It's watching violence without consequences.
I'm sure this comes from the "thik of the children!" censorship mentality: That watching violence would breed violence (hit: Being the victim of violence is what makes you violent, duh). And it's counter-productive. It does not a dress the real cause, but it creates a sense that vilence has no consequences. That's scary wrong.
The old japanese anime show would have deaths... watch UFO Robot Grandizer: When the giant robots fight in a city, people die! Children are orphaned!
But never in a US show: No consequences. And less and less in jap shows, since their market extends to the states now, they're starting to censor at creation rather than let the maniac censors of america butcher their shows when they're sold overseas (like that is gonna stop 'em... check out gamepolitics.com for Jack Thompson's stance on japanese culture corrupting American Youth).
In fact, if you can ever get your hand on the Earthworm Jim cartoon plot episode, they do a great joke on this (jim throws a were-puppy monster at a bus full of orphans, and then draws attention to the fact that none of the kids were hurt).
Stop treating kids as if they were stupid: They are young, ignorant, not necessarily stupid (although, obviously, some are). Teach them that violence makes victims, not that violence has no consequences. Stop trying to shield them from the reality of the world, because the world isn't as safe as you'd like to pretend it is, and it will hit them hard if they are unprepared.
You can't take the sky from me...
>> You can't sue the maker of a legitimate product just because the person using said product has an addictive personality. You can sue maker of a known addictive product for failing to provide adequate warning and selling it to minors. WoW is *designed* to be addictive, most of the game is straight out of Reinforcement Schedules/Conditioning psychology textbook.
There is no such thing as an addictive personality. The mechanisms for addiction (ie, DOPAMINE RECEPTORS) exist in everyone's brain; it's just a matter of finding something that helps you cope, and then abusing it. You, too, will be addicted, easy as pie.
This is the same thing as suing Coors or Budwiser for DUI deaths, or liver disease... addiction comes in all sorts of forms. You can't sue the maker of a legitimate product just because the person using said product has an addictive personality.
/ 2023.html
Actually... I seem to recall that there was one person who successfully sued some mfg. of spirits when her child was born with birth defects. Since then I there is a nice spiffy little warning label. And alcohol is not exactly the catagory of "legitimate" product... not like Methamphetamines which were onces prescribed like candy.
http://print.injury.findlaw.com/accutane/articles
Not that I disagree with you. There is that film "Mazes and Monsters" staring a young Tom Hanks that revolves around a character who's so obsessed with a D&D style game after the death of his sibling IIRC he honestly believes that jumping off a skyscraper will result in some form of magical intervention that would reunite him with lost family. But as with this case of fiction it's generally accepted that anyone who can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy is well nuts... including the parents who showed this to their kids trying to get them to stop playing D&D.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084314/
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
A kid jumping to his death because he's too into the game is not foreseeable. You have to be really dumb or a few cards short of a deck to do this.
On the other hand, it should be obvious that jumping too far will kill you - I learned that lesson like a lot of other kids by jumping out of a tree. 10 feet is ok, but 15 sucks!
his is probably even worse than suing WB for their Wiley Coyote cartoons. There Wiley is rarely hurt from jumping great heights while in WoW I'm sure they probably got hurt.
Yup. My first WoW death was from jumping out of a tree. Of course, I mainly wanted to see what would happen when you die. This kid learned the hard way that, in real life, you don't walk from the nearest graveyard to your body and go get your stuff fixed.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
1. Establishment of a World of Warcraft Account.
While the legality of such an agreement is obviously questionable, the agreement seems to put liability squarely on the parent who registered the account.
(If you want to read some other crazy stuff. Read the entire ToS. Its damn scary. I wouldn't be supprised if they showed up wanting my first born.)
I do security
[rant] I've played many games, and have gotten addicted to quite a few of them, my roommate and I spent an entire year playing games online together, we also hosted dnd games, and L5R games (another style of dnd game http://www.l5r.com/) and in the past 7+ years, none of my 20+ friends who have played dnd/l5r or anything with us have; committed suicide, tryed to re-enact, re-create anything that we've played out in our games. Now, that being said, I'm sure there were quite a few of us who have thought 'wouldn't it be cool to be able to blink, and turn invisible.' or something along those lines. But than again, who hasn't thought that. AND! to that end, why is it a games fault, look at tv, look at movies. I find it incredibly funny, and insulting as a gamer, that the most graphic/gory/destructive tv show is on every day, at least 3 times a day, on almost every single channel, News. My perspective on games, and their effects on people, is a rather simple one. It goes a little something like this.
A famous mom once said "I don't care what 'Jimmy' said, if little 'jimmy' jumped off a bridge, would you follow him, and jump as well."
sorry if anyone's name here happens to be jimmy. or jim, or anything like that, no reference meant
Now I'm sure almost everyone on these boards has heard this saying at least once, and can appreciate it's meaning. = just because so and so did that, what makes you think you can to.
I'm really quite sick of horrible parents trying to find an easy scapegoat for their own incapabilities.
Lets break something down here
car accidents attribute to the most deaths (aside from accidents, natural, and wartime) in the US (according to disastercentre http://www.disastercenter.com/cdc/ and yet parents/family members/relatives never seem to sue car manufatcurers (aside from when the car actually has a defect). MADD is trying to get stiffer penalties to alcohol makers when their product is found to be the cause of car accidents causing death, but that has so far failed, for a reason, it's not the manufacturers fault, it's the fault of the user.
However, when it comes to kids doing incredibly stupid things, if it can be even remotely related to a game they played, BAM instant lawsuit.
It seems that recently, lawsuits are fast becoming the replacement for good parenting. If a parent has a problem with their child, they immediately blame it on the most recent game that their child played.
I'm shocked that parents of dead soldiers aren't suing makers of games like America's Army, or Battlefield, or Counterstrike? I'm sure that's in the works somewhere.
Anyways.
I really don't see how a Game can force a child/teen/adult, person, to go out and do something incredibly stupid. It really makes you wonder, what happened to good ol common sense.
In the case of WOW vs. flying chinese child, I wonder. Where were the parents, where was the parenting that says, jumping off the balcony is not smart. Where were the parents saying "are you done your homework?" For that matter, where were the parents when this kid bought the game, ignoring the fact that the game is intended for teens (yeah I know T=13 plus) but still, I wonder if the parents know anything about the game, aside from the fact that it's made by that american company that they're suing...???
I'm really quite appalled that soo many parents are turning to the courts to help back them in their failures to parent properly. [/rant]
Where are the good ol days when babysitters were real, cute girls, that every kid loved having over, just for a chance to "cop a feel" not games, or TV that "implants bad thoughts in childrens heads"
I really must ask the question. If games are soo bad, why do so many parents turn a blind eye when their kids go out and get them??? OOPS I forg
A single incident is not an example of natural selection, any more than the collision of two particles is an example of the ideal gas law. Common sense is not genetic, and what we consider common sense isn't necessarily anti-survival. I'll bet that this kid, had he lived, would have quickly begun engaging in unprotected sex with multiple partners, which would be doing a lot more to promote his genetic material than most of us are doing. Evolution is a scientific theory just like Maxwell's equations or quantum mechanics. If you wouldn't feel comfortable talking about the latter, you likely talk about the former at your peril.
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
Any kid, boy or girl, who hasn't figured out they can't fly by the age of 13 has either had a very, very poor education or has some major mental handicaps. In either case they shouldn't have been allowed to play a Rated "T" game as it should have been obvious to the parents that even though they might be aged 13, they obviously didn't have the full mental capacity of a 13 year old (or a 3 year old for that matter). I feel bad for the parents in this case, but blaming the gaming company for your bad parenting is an obvious case of passing the buck. I truly feel for any parent that loses a child so, I have 2 of the little buggers myself, so don't think that I don't feel sympathy for what they are going through. I'm simply trying to state the fact that kids don't gun down their school mates, commit suicide and/or acts of murder or try to fly unless there are some major underlying problems other than the game, music, movie, book or whatever other form of media the parents, lawyers and politicians try to blame it on. Just one Hoosierbillys opinion as usual ;),
Jason
Jay Dale "If you're not living on the edge then you're taking up too much space!"
My son plays video games - plenty of them too. He plays WoW, GTA, and about a half dozen games that involve various levels of mayhem. He laughs hysterically at the images of bodies dropping, sans heads, with the appropriate level of blood splatter to boot.
But he is a major-class wimp when it comes to seeing the real thing. My wife, my daughters and I can sit in the living room watching a Discovery television program on surgery techniques, where flesh and bone are exposed and articulated for the camera. No problems for us. My son, however, gets noticeably queasy and has to leave the room to avoid getting sick.
I took him in to the podiatrist to have him examined for surgery on his feet. The doctor described in detail the procedure they will be following to correct his bunions. That process involves cutting wedges out of his phalanges and shaving the metatarsals. I watched my son as the doctor went through his description and noted the loss of color in his face, his agitated state, and his breathing. I thought he was going to vomit in the examination room. And all the doctor was doing was talking.
When we got in the car to head back home I asked my son why he was unable to deal with the descriptions of cutting and shaving bone when he could watch people blown to bits playing video games.
His reply was: "I know the difference between fantasy and reality".
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"