Slashdot Mirror
Why Do Computer Games Claim Lives?
Ektar wrote to mention an article from Chosun, a Korean newspaper, asking the question why do videogames claim lives? The article is in response to some recent high profile gamer deaths. From the article: "Apparently rare overseas, such cases make frequent headlines in Korea. Why? Experts point to the poor environment of the 'PC bang' or Internet cafes that have mushroomed nationwide. Generally dark and poorly ventilated, they cater to gamers who tend to smoke heavily. The bad air and light can increase the danger of sudden death, experts warn."
From TFA:
On Dec. 8, a 38-year-old man died suddenly after playing Internet games for 20 straight days at an Internet café, sustaining himself solely on instant noodles.
I think we just nailed it in this case. What's the mystery?
WWJD?
JWRTFM!
Gotta love the shift of responsibility.
I take it the game just reached out on its own volition and killed the people?
Thats as bad as saying "the SUV ran over the child", or " a gun shot the teller during the holdup".
Cant anyone take responsibility for their own actions any more?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm not even a gamer and I can tell this is just another example of sensationalist journalism.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Um... darkness isn't deadly.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
People die all the time while laying in beds. No one publishes an article every time it happens, wondering "why beds claim lives". Yet every time someone dies while playing a game, it's big news. Never mind that they've chosen to go for days without eating, drinking, or sleeping; apparently it was the game that killed them.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
> they cater to gamers who tend to smoke heavily. The bad air and
> light can increase the danger of sudden death, experts warn.
And this is different to the den of the average console gamer how?
Videogames claim lives because the government wants to regulate video games.
The longer you live, the more likely you are to die of something new. The newer it is, the more likely it gets your dead self in the newspaper.
The more hype it gets in the news, the more people think it's more significant than getting hit by a car or falling out of a tree.
Someone cries on TV. Lawyers get involved. New laws are passed that prohibit things. Life becomes a little less worth living. People resort to videogames to escape. And then...
Maybe someday, we'll wise up and just allow people to make their own choices.
I need to disagree with your comment. Hundreds of adults die on freeways out of MILLIONS. If the same begins to be true for gamers (from poor nutrition, hygiene, etc), then it certainly is a crisis. From TFA, someone who plays games for 20 days straight in a net cafe, REALLY does have a problem. If cases like this grow around the world, then it is a problem.
Anyone would get that way sitting in front of a computer that long. I do. Why blame games exclusively?
All good gamers know that you play until your hit points get low, rest, then come back. The period of time between resting grows longer as you level up.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
Generally dark and poorly ventilated, they cater to gamers who tend to smoke heavily. The bad air and light can increase the danger of sudden death, experts warn."
So the games themselves do not cause death. Instead, and unhealthy environment, poor nutritional habits, and general Lard-assed-ness cause death.
Who knew?
Next we will discover that video games don't make you kill others, and that guns just sit there unless some picks them up and uses them.
What is this, Masters of the Obvious week?
Feh.
I've seen several of these stories. The "victim" plays games to the exclusion of everything else.
He neglects small health problems until they become life threatening. Lack of sleep, malnutrition, etc. add to these health problems.
Suddenly, one less gamer.
Any compulsive behavior could possibly lead to one's death.
It's the radiation from the monitors that killed them. Everyone stay away from computers, they'll kill you! No, wait! I'm on a computer! Aahhh!
Someone save me from this sanity.
People commit suicide for many reasons. Most of them stupid (loss of love or wealth, failing at something) The gamer suicide probably stems from an unusually strong emotional investment and the subsequent loss of or failure at that which they so irrationally care so much about. It is no different than someone committing suicide over the loss of a girlfriend/boyfriend or for the older the loss of a job. The fact that it was gaming related is just a novelty.
If something exists that does not need a creator (god) then why must the cosmos need one?
As with anything, there are extremists in video games. Yeah, video game extremism is a little less written about than say, religious extremism, but there are some people who take everything to the extreme. And doing anything to the extreme can lead to serious injury or death, be it gaming, drinking, sports, what-have-you...
Join the Empire! http://www.empirereborn.net/
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. I rest my case ^_^
This guy is responsible :)
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
There was a time cars claimed lives. This was in the day when it was thought that having a sharp metal pin aimed at the drivers chest and directly connected to the front of the car was a good design feature. Same with regular glass windows and nice sharp metal knobs. Saves you the worry of how to get out of your vehicle after a crash I suppose.
In that way cars killed their passengers although the more accurate claim would be that it was the designers of the car that killed the passengers.
You can say that smoke claims lives (smoke as from a fire) but this again is a fairly direct form. You would not say that love claims lives despite the fact that an awfull lot of people commit suicide over a broken heart.
It is not the gameplay that killed them. If say you were playing a DDR game that just kept getting more and more intense until the user falls dead THEN the game would claim lives. If you played fear and got so scared you suffered a heart attack THEN the game would have claimed a live.
Just taking bad care of yourselve is not the games fault. Sitting motionless in a chair eating bad food is not restricted to gaming. Just ask your average soccer widow.
All these guys seemed to have neglected their body for a prolonged time and were probably not the most healthy in the first place.
One article claimed the 38 year old male in question had existed on a 20 day diet of instant noodles. Eheh and before? Because I know from personal experience that the body can live a lot longer then that on instant noodles. I am willing to bet a few bucks that before he wasn't exactly a 2fruit+veg a day man either. So the real newsstory is, man who neglects his health totally does not live to a ripe old age (38 was once an advanced age for a human to reach)
The other has someone having a 9 hour gaming session? Well I doubt anyone would be able to do that without having to pee and even then so what? I done far longer sessions. Perhaps this person was not the most prime example of the human species? If 9 hours in chair kills you then all this proves that darwin was on to something. You know there are people out there who for fun do 12 hour marches? What about pole-sitting contests?
Nah I am afraid that as I read these stories it is just, not very healthy person dies doing something to extreme. I had an elderly neighbour who died going to the toilet (yeah how do you like to discover that eh?) Apperently the "pressure" caused a bloodvessel (internally) to burst and she bled to death. Going to the toilet is bad for you? No she just was old and that was her time. If it hadn't been then it would have been if she had bend down to lift something heavy. Sad but that is live. No need to make a headline off it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
20 days without sleep could be deadly, though.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
You can't compare IQ across populations. IQ is standardized on a population and then only predictive on that population. If the test had of been standardized on African-Americans, Asians would score below 100. Its all down to how good your culture is at answering the IQ questions picked. The source you picked is a bit suspect as at least one of the authors seems to have a racist agenda.
" In 1991 I extended my work on race differences in intelligence to other races. I concluded that the average IQ of blacks in sub-Saharan Africa is approximately 70. It has long been known that the average IQ of blacks in the United States is approximately 85. The explanation for the higher IQ of American blacks is that they have about 25 per cent of Caucasian genes and a better environment." is a quote from R. Lynn's web page, and this is no where near the most blatant.
Now I suspect you didn't go far enough in your research to find this, but just remember that IQ has long been used to justify racial superiority. When ever you see a cross cultural comparison based on IQ please consider the source.
As for the rest of your post, as a psych student I would be very interested to see the correlation between intelligence and obsessive behaviour (of any kind). While it is a stereotype that more intelligent adolescents play video-games, I would need evidence to show that there is any causal relationship.
Take a look at home many gamers there are out there, then look at how many of them die from these kinds of situations. Not that terribly many, right? Now take a quick peak at two of societies most common forms of entertainment, nicotine and alcohol (for those cultures who don't subscribe to those particular poisons, I leave it up to the reader to substitute). How many people dies every year because of those two? And not just from the direct causes (alcolism / lugn cancer) but from side effects such as the users killing others.
So the point is, games are far less dangerous than alcohol and nicotine. Fix those problems first instead of whining about obvious cases of mental illness where society is unwilling to find and treat the people who are sick.
Now move along, nothing to see...
I admit, I stay up until 4 or 5 in the morning playing PC games, but then I go to sleep for the normal 8 or 10 hours a person would sleep and get up at 2 or 3 in the afternoon. However, what these people are doing is completely different, they stay up non-stop, for days and even weeks on end. Of course staying in a room with bad ventilation and a bad air supply (smoking) will cause asphyxiation, and of course staying up for days on end will drain your energy to the point where you can't move.
My point is, its not the games that kill, its the life-style that these people are living.
<i>It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.</i>
8 monster%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grue_%2
Empathetic-- 94% You tend to walk in someone else's shoes a hundred miles before pointing a finger.
In Soviet Russia, games kill YOU!
Err...
... for their own actions. I mean look, video games can, for some people, I suppose, be as addictive as drugs. Liquor companies are no more responsible for alcoholics than video game publishers are for video game addicts. That is to say, neither video game publishers nor liquor companies are responsible. In the U.S., we've been building this culture of "it's not my fault." Cigarette companies are sued for people dying from smoking, McDonalds is sued for people pouring hot coffee on themselves or getting obese from eating their food.
I'm a big believer in Darwinism and the "not my fault" culture goes completely against it. It's like those stupid warnings on hair dryers that warn you not to use them in the shower. If you protect idiots long enough, they'll breed. That's bad. If a guy is going to spend 20 days straight playing video games and eating noodles, then he should die. There's obviously something very wrong with his genes and that's not a trait you want to pass on to the next generation.
That might sound cold and heartless, but to some degree, you need to be able to follow a basic instinct to survive or you need to be pulled from the gene pool. Protecting all these people from themselves actually encourages bad genes to propagate and it actually hurts the race as a whole.
Oh well, guess I'll get off my soap box, but I just wish people would start taking responsibility for their own lives and stop blaming their bad habits on everyone else.
Actually, it's not "Hundreds", it's "Tens of Thousands". Cars _are_ dangerous.
In 2002, 48,000 people died on the road. Your yearly odds of dying a transportation related death are about 1 in 5,953.
Your odds of dying as a car occupant are about 1 in 17,625
Strangely enough, you're more likely to die of falling down, poisoning yourself (accidentally) or shooting yourself (intentionally)
http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm
I'm not racist, I don't think IQ means anything incredibly important and I'm sure it's not the whole picture, and I think your response was lacking. Given that, here's my response.
You can't compare IQ across populations. IQ is standardized on a population and then only predictive on that population. If the test had of been standardized on African-Americans, Asians would score below 100. Its all down to how good your culture is at answering the IQ questions picked.
That's a pretty bold, sweeping assertion. IQ tests aren't perfect, but neither are they arbitrary. I'm going to call you on that. Do you have any sources supporting this? Especially given that ACT/SAT/GRE are largely IQ tests?
The source you picked is a bit suspect as at least one of the authors seems to have a racist agenda.
I won't apologize for a racist, if that's what he is (it's hard to tell), but the fact remains that this is an interesting question, he's one of the few compiling any sort of statistics, and I don't think you've made a good case on why his statistics are invalid. If you have counter-statistics, I'd love to see them. Basically, I think you might be attacking your stereotype of the misinformed racist layperson. I can understand that, since this is a touchy subject, but it's also an interesting subject if we can find a good way to discuss it.
Now I suspect you didn't go far enough in your research to find this, but just remember that IQ has long been used to justify racial superiority. When ever you see a cross cultural comparison based on IQ please consider the source.
I appreciate your point (though I think your suggestion that I "didn't go far enough" in my research was inappropriate- you don't know me, and I'm not calling your credentials into question), but taking this stance hinders any serious discussion about this issue. I don't conflate IQ with superiority, and acknowledge IQ has been mis-used in the past. It's also not what most people think it is, and isn't the whole picture of a person. *But* I think the burden is on you to prove that IQ measures *nothing* given the amount it's used in our society. The military uses extensive IQ testing, and ACT/SAT/GRE tests are basically IQ tests.
As for the rest of your post, as a psych student I would be very interested to see the correlation between intelligence and obsessive behaviour (of any kind). While it is a stereotype that more intelligent adolescents play video-games, I would need evidence to show that there is any causal relationship.
I find this response a little too dismissive. But to respond, I think though there is little non-anecdotal data on this subject to date, there is plenty of anecdotal data, as you mention, and examining the lives of famously successful intelligent people (i.e. Newton, Einstein, Kant) showcases obsessive tendencies. Conflating "famously successful intelligent people" and "intelligent people" to make an anecdotal argument certainly isn't a bulletproof argument-- but personally it's more than enough to suggest that someone should study this. China, however, has to make immediate and important predictions on how their population will react to online gaming, and I think they'd be foolish to rule out a genetic component which is also correlated to IQ out of hand, given the (ample anecdotal) evidence.
If you put serious thought into a response, I will respond.
Just a note about the instant noodles here. MSG and other flavouring chemicles are still used liberally in the instant noodles. I wouldn't be surprised if these chemicles did a fair amount of damage to the deceased's body.
This is nature's way of telling the guy that anyone who plays a videogame for 20 hours straight DOES NOT HAVE A LIFE.
You know, if games, much like smoking, overeating, narcotics, and STDs throw a little chlorine in the gene pool, what's the problem? We're all ultimately better off that they aren't breeding.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
I never meant to suggest that you were racist. I may have come across badly. I was pleased that you cited a source, and that I could follow it up. I do not think that you are racist because you, in good faith, cited a source of someone of questionable motive.
The IQ test, (Often the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale) is a standardized test. When you standardize on a population you reject questions that produce both a low or high score. When applied to a population that is different from the standardized one, some of the questions that they would have performed well may have been rejected.
The best example of how this can be done is to take repeated IQ test. When you do this you will learn how to write these tests, and your score will improve accordingly. You are no longer representative of the standardizing population, and so the validity of the test has been reduced.
It is fairly safe to assume that the military uses tests that are standardized on the population that they are recruiting from. As for the SAT/GRE and all those other tests. They aren't intelligence tests, what they do is predict performance in a particular environment. When you don't perform well on a SAT because you aren't a member of the standardized population, you still will have the same problems when you try and perform in the target environment.
Don't get me wrong I wasn't saying that IQ tests are useless, just that they lose validity across cultures. As for the arbitrary, well intelligence is a bit hard to pin down. As such any definition of IQ has some parts that are arbitrary. What IQ does more than anything is test performance in the western style academic and work place environments. As such it is only an intelligence test as far as those are correlated.
As for the second part of my post. I wasn't trying to be dismissive, I was just interested if you knew of any links.
Finally, for the citations, well sorry but my library access is down so I can't look at any real sources right now, but I did get help from my 1st year psych book. None of the others I checked even mentioned IQ.
>As I noted in another comment, this seems to be connected to the cafe gaming
>environment, which maybe makes the enjoyment more intense (or whatever, I don't really
>know). If it is that way, then we can just ask(/regulate) the shopkeepers to pay some
>attention to what their customers are doing.
Then again, I think the exact same thing is true of a bar. Why is it that all these people can go to the bar, and get drunk (with the bar's staff being quite happy to continue shelling out more drinks as long as the cash keeps coming in), and then once the customer is completely drunk, they walk out to their car, and on the way home they run into and kill someone.. and none of the blame goes to the bartender..?
I'm not saying it's all the bartender's fault - on the contrary, it's the drunk's fault for getting drunk. But if anybody (read: the bartender) cared about either the drunk or the person he killed, they either wouldn't have let the guy get totally drunk in the first place, or at the very least would have tried to make sure the guy took a taxi home or something.
It seems to me it would be a little like a gun store owner seeing two guys get into a fight out in front of his store, and then one guy ducks out of the fight to come into the store and buy a gun... and the owner sells it to him. Sure, it's true that the guy who then proceeds to leave the store and shoot the other guy he was fighting with is the one responsible for the death. But the gun store owner knew what he was going to do with it, so shouldn't that count as being accomplice to murder or something?
I don't have a problem with beer, or guns, or video games.. if you use them properly. And people only start dying from them when you *don't* use them properly.
Early bird may get the worm.. but the second mouse gets the cheese.
I've done seven. No sleep, no food, and drinking nothing but coffee and booze. The light show near the end was freakin' amazing.
- nk
Sleep deprived people shouldn't attend firework displays. They're a hazard to others as well as themselves.
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.