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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."'"
Scruffy gonna die the way he lived
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
... the lead paint on the game controller.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It's the sound of Jack Thompson creaming his pants
Guess we'll just have to ban online gaming. How many more have to die??
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
All you need is a beer helmet and a chick giving you a blow job and you could die with all your bases covered.
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
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.
we always see this stuff coming out of countries in Asia , are they that fanatical about these games ?
I mean geez I have hard enough time playing xbox for more then an hour without having to at least get a bottle of water. How do they do it ?
Do you think when he died he dropped any loot ?
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This wouldn't have happened if he had been running Linux.
What? It did say he was Chinese, right?
What?
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This is precisely the problem with the youth of today compared to my Great Generation. Just one gamer kicks the bucket and 100 others run away from the scene scared. Come on guys, show some courage. Show some sticktoitiveness.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Hehe, actually, it isn't that a new concept.
For instance, game console manuals have been reminding you to take breaks for many years. The Game Gear manual, I know, had it.
Earthbound (SNES), too, actively alerted you after like 3 hours that you should really take a break (your dad calls your cell phone). It also had billboards about it (Mothers against Obsession or something).
I remember playing Earthbound till it alerted me several times. It helped; I'd be like "Oh CRAP, I have been playing a long time."
Thsi is a very good point. Given the difficulties of controlling what people acess over the Internet, perhaps it's easier to just start subtly demonizing the whole thing.
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Double Kill
Multi Kill
Mega Kill!
ULTRA KILL!!
M-m-m-monster Kill.
LUDACRIS KILL!
H O L Y S H I T!
R E A L I T Y KILL!!!!!
The (lack of) stability of the Operating System prevents running a computer for such marathon sessions.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
I'm an Asian gamer with a mild addiction to warcraft 3. I don't understand how Asia can have a few of these incidents and the west has so none.Is there a distinct cultural difference to explain this? Or is it just statistic's? There i about 2.5 billion people in Asia proper vs 1 billion in all of the west. I don't understand how addiction is going to force you to sleep or drink or eat. I suppose I don't understand because all of my addictions are mild and state endorsed (women, video games, food, and tea).
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
>He died playing WoW. Do I have any takers?
If that were true, I'd say his life just improved.
Latewire
Ahh greatest lines EVER !!! Half Baked !
Cocaine Addict: Marijuana is not a drug. I used to suck dick for coke. Now that's an addiction. You ever suck some dick for marijuana?
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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 love the quote/proverb at the bottom of my comments:
To err is human -- to blame it on a computer is even more so.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
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.
The State has confirmed today that it has struck a deal with Comcast to provide monitoring services stating had Comcast's service been in place, no one would have died as their Internet service would have been terminated in time to save the victim.
Comcast has yet to release a statement about the deal however the President has been heard stating in the back "It's Comcastic!!"
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
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"...
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.
Actually, the first Marathon was fatal.
Nobody ever learns from history.
Blank until
Heh. In 1996 we got our university lab outfitted with 5 SUN machines. What did we do first? Put dgaDoom on them and played. We played for about 48 hours. It was crazy... With the exception of going to bathroom, we stayed and played deathmatches (!) one after another. We even hired the low-graders to bring us food and drinks :).
...
Man, what times
>He died playing WoW. Do I have any takers?
If that were true, I'd say his life just improved.
Perhaps he thought his Second Life would kick in.
Blank until
It would definitely be more relevant to know whether he was using any stimulants to stay awake.
Lemon curry???
Are we sure it wasn't just the smell?
PERL:
All of the power of Voodoo with most of the understandibility!
You hear about people surviving the wild for days or weeks with little or no food and water, and these people are hiking or walking, and in very hot or cold climates. So how is that only after 3 days someone who is just sitting there using almost no muscles can die in such a short time? Are they so malnurished that any day without food and water is death? Is their brain using so much energy gaming it starves their body?
How funny/sad is that? No "did he have a medical condition?", no "was there evidence of foul play", no "is there an autopsy scheduled", just "what game was he playing?"
With xmame, I have thousands of classic arcade games at my fingertips. That's enough games to play for years without a break. I think that's more than enough games for anyone.
No, they may not be the latest fancy 3D games, but classic games have something the latest games totally lack: gameplay.
Did he drop any good loot?
Somehow, i'm thinking that this "addiction issue" isn't what it seems to be ...
Tu long
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.
"I want him in the games until he dies playing." -- MCP
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Nonsense! We rinsed out the bongs twice a day during that week ;-)
Living With a Nerd
Sorry, but I see nothing wrong with copying games owned by entities which no longer even exist, which is the case for most games of the 70s and 80s.
I certainly don't see Atari and Midway suing people for trading Pac-Man and Zaxxon roms on Bittorrent.
Well, there are a couple of big factors that can cause problems. One, as I wondered about in my OP, is the possibility of chemicals used to stay awake. I don't know what the situation is like in China, so I can't even begin to make an educated guess as to the availability of particular drugs there. And, indeed you're correct about the dangers of sitting in the same position for that long. You can develop a deep venous thrombosis in your leg that can then migrate to your lung, and at that point you're just about SOL unless you can get medical attention quickly. This danger can be magnified by dehydration, which is a possible third problem as 3 days without enough water intake (and, obviously, other nutrition) can result in electrolyte abnormalities, which can also be life-threatening, causing things like kidney failure.
You're right that staying conscious (or, at least, semi-conscious) for 3 days isn't a life-threatening problem by itself. It's the lack of movement, lack of hydration, etc. that can put you into the dirt (or the crematorium, YMMV).