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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.
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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.
... by a player on the same WoW server as I. Here are the forum posts.
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?
Sure. Callous Bastard.
You're missing the point. JT is exploting the death of a young person for his own selfish, ignorant crusade.
And this will go along with your sig,
Games don't kill people, people kill people!
Just because people play games doesn't mean they are filling their lives with emptiness. Religion is certainly not the only way to fill emptiness in one's life, and in my opinion, it's far from the best.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship