Slashdot Mirror
Another Man Dies After Marathon Gaming Session
loserMcloser writes "Another Chinese man has died after spending three days in an internet cafe for an online gaming marathon session. He apparently fainted and died at the cafe from exhaustion. 'The report did not say what the man, whose name was not given, was playing. The report said that about 100 other Web surfers "left the cafe in fear after witnessing the man's death."'"
This is coming from state-run media, it doesn't contain enough details for easy independent verification -- and the state has indicated that combating "Internet addiction" is one of its goals.
There's a lack of truthiness here.
Well, it *IS* the most populated place in the world... racial differences notwithstanding, statistically the odds are that for any given random human trait, you are most likely to find it there in the highest quantity.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
A lot more people die from sky diving every year, and I think most of us accept that sky diving is not an epidemic social problem.
...
Real problems could include: chronic disease, car accidents, criminal violence,
I think it's more of a problem that 100 people fled the scene than one guy dying from his compulsive personality disorder.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I'd guess it's one of two things, either he's earning money by farming loot and if he logs/leaves he will reduce his income substantially (because someone else will get his location or it takes a long time to reach). Or he's really just on the receiving end of a variable schedule reward system and he misses the dopamine hits too much to leave.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
This isn't a reason for games/console to remind players to take breaks. This is a reason to make even better games that will ensnare more of the world's obviously pathetic genetic material and flush it down the same toilet that this guy went down.
I've had VERY long gaming sessions, even ones where I (quite foolishly) remained sitting for 12 hours in a row. But, one of the reasons I've never gone much longer that is that there were warning signs that I should quit, from yawning to blurred vision. There's no doubt in my mind that people who die in this fashion suffer symptoms long before they keel over, and at the very least there are the symptoms that everyone suffers when they need sleep (like, you know, falling asleep).
Of course, there's plenty of blame to throw around to others as well. How about the staff of this cafe? What could possibly possess them to let this guy keep going? What was he ingesting in order to remain awake for that ridiculous period of time, and why didn't they either stop him ingesting it or stop serving him? Heck, after 24 hours I'd probably call an ambulance on spec! But, it's China, so who knows how people react...still, just the process of one human caring about the welfare of any other should have caused some reaction.
To reiterate my original point, though: Now that it's over, it's probably just as well that he's gone. Not only was he dumb as a half-bag of rocks, but the fact that he could do this to himself in a public place tells me that he's probably better off dead than living in his community.
Did I miss something? As far as I've heard, the only other case of death from gaming exhausting happened in Korea, but the submitter says "another Chinese man"...
Perhaps we have a lot less to escape from.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A few weeks ago there was a post about a programming competition sponsored by Microsoft in which students were expected to stay up for 24 hours straight and eat soda and junk food while coding.
People here are laughing about this guy because he neglected sleep and nutrition to compete in this contest. They are saying "darwin award." Where was this same sentiment when Microsoft caused students to do the same thing for a different contest?
Health should come before work and play, people! Your job is worthless if you are dead or ill from a terrible lifestyle. Don't let your boss force this behavior on you, and don't let companies like Microsoft force it on students.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
It would definitely be more relevant to know whether he was using any stimulants to stay awake.
Lemon curry???
24 hours is nothing. You've never pulled an all-nighter to get a semester project completed?
Are you telling me you can't see the difference between a voluntary competition (hint: its kinda fun to pull an all-nighter every now and then... I have a wife and 2 kids and if I come across a fun project, I still do it from time to time) and a man who was either incapable of determining his tolerance or chose to ignore it (most likely the latter)?
And I suppose you would have people oppose the voluntary fund raiser Up till Dawn as well? I mean, think of the college students that will be kept up all night and have to go to class in the morning!
I heard a really good article a few weeks ago on NPR where sociologists were looking into the root cause of internet/gaming addiction in China. One interesting theory is that this generation of gamers is the product of the "one child per family" policy in China. Essentially this generation in China is full of only-children. This is bound to cause social issues, and this internet/gaming addiction is only a symptom of a larger sociological problem.
Gun control basically is the same thing: for a gun to really be a problem one must already be prepared to break the law. So given that a willingness to break the law is already a prerequisite for a gun crime to take place: do you really think that the culprit is gonna give a damn that he's breaking a law by obtaining or carrying a gun?
To put it into Slashdot terms: it would be like the government outlawing encryption to prevent terrorists from communicating. If they're talking about blowing up a building do you really think they are afraid to have a copy of PGP installed on their computer? Nope. All outlawing encryption does is take it away from the people who were originally using it for non-illegal purposes, or make criminals out of those who refuse to give it up even if their original actions were perfectly legal. Same applies to guns.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
a) It is assuming that people are rational beings and that all actions are well premeditated. It's pretty well known by now that people are irrational (hey, how's that for a slashdot audience, this is a blog entry by the gmail creator!). Basically, in a surge of emotion (think domestic fights, a depressed / severely stressed kid (say a highschool shooting)), if one can easily have access to guns (by opening the local cabinet, going to a store, etc.), they can cause massively more damage, significantly more easily.
b) That the massive number of guns going around in a society will always be used by the people they were intended in the way they were intended. This is patently not true, as demonstrated by kids getting access to their grandfather's gun, or various people we (the west) have massively funded and provided guns to (think Bin Laden and the Mujahideen's in Afganistan vs the Soviets, or Saddam versus the Iranians).
There's also, of course, a moral argument. The only primary purpose of the gun is to kill. The whole protection stuff is completely secondary; a gun 'protects' by killing, or threatening to kill. I, personally, think that society has an obligation to protect its citizens, and banning a device the purpose of which is to kill is a good idea.
Guns don't kill people, people kill people. And monkeys kill people. If you give them a gun. (to quote eddie izzard)