Gaming to Death

Here is a weird internet gaming story.  A man in southern China appears to have died of exhaustion after a three-day Internet gaming binge, state media said Monday.  The 30-year-old man fainted at a cybercafe in the city of Guangzhou on Saturday afternoon after he had been playing games online for three days, the Beijing News reported.   Paramedics tried to revive him but failed and he was declared dead at the cafe, it said.

China has 140 million Internet users, second only to the United States. It is one of the world’s biggest markets for online games, with tens of millions of players, many of whom hunker down for hours in front of computers in public Internet cafes.

Several cities have clinics to treat what Chineese psychiatrists have dubbed “Internet addiction” in users, many of them children and teenagers, who play online games or surf the web for days at a time.  They don’t eat and sometimes they even wear adult diapers or use chemical toliets so they don’t have to take breaks.   Ewwww, gross!

Add comment September 19th, 2007