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More On The MGS Suicide
Last Thursday we mentioned the misreporting of a gamer's suicide, the death of a young man who frequented a Metal Gear Solid forum. This week, GamePolitics tries to clear things up by talking with one of the forum admins and giving gamers a place to air their reactions to related events, such as Jack Thompson's callous disregard for the young man's life. The Guardian Gamesblog comments on the unreality of the situation: "According to Gaminghorizon, AFP, the international newswire service that picked up on the Bulgarian story, has corrected its take on the events, although news sites that picked up on AFP's original version, including CNN and Yahoo have apparently yet to make alterations to their reports. Ultimately, the lack of major international media coverage has lent this sequence of events an air of unreality, of illegitimacy. A tragedy quietly perpetrated and pulled apart online."
Having played online games and posted in a few forums, it's clear that most people actually care about others. Usually online communities seem to be pretty closely knit groups of people, otherwise you wouldn't log on to them--kind of makes sense.
...
If this young man committed suicide, he obviously needed a close group of friends which would explain why he would log onto the forums. Perhaps he was looking for someone to talk him out of it and he couldn't find anybody anywhere else? After RTFA, seems like he was a daily poster on the forum.
There's also cases of people dying in real life and the community coming together to remember them. I'm reminded of Luckky Johnson on the Scylla server of Star Wars Galaxies. She battled a serious illness in real life and her character (that was logged on at all times) was suddenly never on anymore.
I Suppose this is just another effect of social networks based on computer networks through the abstracted level of the internet. Will it ever be "ok" to be concerned about guildmates or people you play online with? Right now, everyone seems to treat "meeting online" as a social stigma
My work here is dung.
A tragedy quietly perpetrated and pulled apart online.
I wouldn't say it's quiet by any means...just because the aging 'conventional' news outlets haven't pounced on it. All this serves to do is point out their increasing irrelevance.
Most people concerned with this story get the majority of their current events online...it's not surprising that that's where the coverage occured.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
"such as Jack Thompson's callous disregard for the young man's life"
I didn't manage to find a quote from him.
Thanks in advance.
... by a player on the same WoW server as I. Here are the forum posts.
What?!?!? Jack Thompson doesn't care about gamers dying?! But... but... I thought he was a cuddly fuzzy bunny, full of love and peace and joy! That's why he fights those evil gaming companies, who ... ahh, I can't keep up this bullshit. :)
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
"There's also cases of people dying in real life and the community coming together to remember them."
Case in point: http://www.applenova.com/
They pretty much took down the main page and replaced it with that memorial type page (with links to the other sections still, of course).
This isn't because the games themselves lead to increased suicide rates, but a side-effect of the huge masses of people playing them. If you have several million people playing, a certain number of them are going to die each year.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Somewhere in the US, at a rate of almost one per day, a World of Warcraft player tragically takes his own life.
No, no, don't lynch me yet. I'm a WoW player myself, and on the side of the good guys. I'm just spinning some statistics here to give you an idea of the numbers involved, and hopefully to have some ammunition against the likes of Jack /spit Thompson.
Here's the (very rough) numbers:
The US suicide rate is roughly 12 per 100,000 people. It varies by age group, but for the sake of discussion let's assume that it's approximately correct for the demographic of WoW players. While I'm assuming things, let's also say that there are 2 million WoW players in the US. (it's been a while since I've seen figures, but with 5 million worldwide, that should be in the right ballpark)
2 million players, .012% of them commit suicide annually, that's 240 a year, or 20 a month. Tens of people a month ... hundreds per year ... that's a lot of people. A lot of tragedies. Enough to touch every faction on every server.
But here's the catch: You could probably generate roughly similar figures on WoW players being elected to public office, winning the lottery, or being murdered. When you're talking about millions of people, ANYTHING happens in non-trivial numbers. Pull those numbers out of context, though, and you can make them look like whatever you want them to. You just have to spin the numbers fast enough and hope your readers don't think for themselves.
Of course, made-up "facts" are a lot more lurid than the real truth. They're a lot more "newsworthy" than the things that really happen, the things that we as people who happen to play online games have seen and done. I am far from the only gamer who has sat up all night talking, listening, to a depressed kid who I only knew as text on a screen, with no possible means of contact except that fragile thread of words. There are a couple of people alive today who might not be if they hadn't had me, or someone else they knew in-game, to talk to. One is for sure: some of our mutual friends (I wasn't around at the time) tracked down his parents and got him hauled to the hospital in time. Of course, "Gamer Sits Up All Night Listening To Depressed Friend" just doesn't have the "oomph!" for a good headline. "Teenage Gamer Doesn't Commit Suicide" won't sell many papers. Making stuff up, on the other hand, seems to work very well.
Hundreds of thousands of people read Slashdot. Statistics being what they are, the odds are pretty good some of them will be journalists. Some of those will be shady journalists. If you happen to be one of them, think about this the next time you're tempted to make something like this up: Is it really worth selling papers if the price is the pain inflicted on a person's family, friends, and community when they read your lies?
... like compare the incident to Columbine. Pathetic. (I still have the comment page open on Firefox before his posts were deleted, and can post the entire thing if you guys want.)
/. - long time reader. Jack's been trolling around GP.com for months, and the problem only stopped after his forum equivalent of spitting on a corpse. GP's moderator, Dennis, decided to lock anonymous posting after he continued to toss around insults after his first wave of posts were deleted, so this would force him to get a LJ account, and he's mentioned before that he doesn't want to do that. However the forum is apparently moving to a non-LJ format to make Slashdotting it easier, among other things.
I posted something on GP.com like 'there's no way he's that stupid, just ignore him, he isn't even involved' right before I left school, and ten minutes later Jack started openly insulting MGS.net regulars for apparently not doing enough to save his life.
First post on
RIP Mitch...
We shall all carefully follow the steps of Jack Thompson given in his callous answer, from now on every time you read a teen in a forum talking about killing himself or reciting goth poetry you shall immediately call 911! specially if its in a damn MGS forum! I mean that guy has to be SERIOUS! lying in a videogame site is a federal offense!
Also we should do something important with our lives, instead of wasting our FREE time playing games, such as devoting our lives to a 9-5 job so we can retire with not enough money to pay our bills, become servants of god and let our life fly by since heaven will probably be waiting for us after death (or maybe not, but that's ok) or maybe become famous lawyers who try to suck millions out of game companies for not being "moral" while unawarely giving real thugs great excuses for commiting crimes and getting away with murder "Hey is not MY fault that I shot that kid just now, GTA made me do it! just like in that scene where you fly to outer space and kill a cop?, the makers owe me money big time! they warped my fragile little mind!"
We shall ALL follow the wordly advice. Thanks Jack you have made life whole again! you really know Jack!
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
Could someone point out to me what reliable evidence there is to suggest that this is definately a Jack Thompson message. Not trying to be cynical - I just couldn't find any, and would appreciate a link or something. Many thanks.
I think that's 12 per 100,000 deaths, though, not per 100,000 people per year. Still - you're point stands: there's a high suicide rate accross the board, and it should come as no suprise that with tens of millions of people buying video games, there's going to be overlap.
On the other hand, with the increasing prevalence of gamer communities and social networks online, it should be taken as a good sign that we don't hear about dozens of gamer suicides every year.
Maybe comparing it to the demolitions industry would be accurate? Demolition workers, who have a dirty, dangerous, and often poor paying job, also have an extremely high satisfaction rate and one of the lowest suicide rates in the US. People (men especially) like to break things. It makes us happy and makes us feel big and strong, when the world tends to make us feel insignificant and helpless. Games can also serve to give you a sense of power and control that's lacking otherwise, and generally makes the rest of life a bit less miserable.
And if you want to deny that, go get yourself good and angry (read a compiled collection of your least favorite politician's speeches), and then find something - just about anything, even a pencil can be satisfying - and break it. Take a hammer and just smash it, throw it against the wall, step on it, kick it, hit it with another thing with the goal of breaking both. You'll feel better than you'll want to admit.