Guess where? Yep. It's in Korea again. I've been keeping track of these gamer-related death stories for a while now, and odds are these days that it's either Taiwan or Korea. Once in a while someone in China dies playing games, but those stories tend to be a bit more violent, or just game re-enactments gone horribly awry. Japanese gamers don't tend to die, but they did have an incident a few years back with the Pokemon cartoon inducing seizures.
SEOUL (AFP) - A South Korean man collapsed and died from exhaustion after playing computer games for 10 days without a proper rest.
The 38-year-old man collapsed Thursday as he was playing an on-line game at an Internet cafe in Incheon, west of Seoul.
"He was carried to a nearby hospital but declared dead on arrival," a police officer told AFP.
The officer said the man had played computer games from morning to night every day and had barely stopped to sleep.
In August, a 28-year-old man died in southeastern Taegu city after playing an online computer game for more than two days.
Source: (Yahoo)
The name of the game isn't mentioned, and whenever I hear these kind of stories, a voice in the back of my head says Please tell me it's not Diablo II. There's just something eerie about knowing that a product you helped create is responsible for someone's demise. Luckily, there's no mention of the game's name in the article, and Diablo II, being an almost 6 year old game just isn't played like that anymore.
It also scares me because I was once an Everquest Junkie, so I know how days, months, and even years can fly by while playing an online game. This is probably why I don't play World of Warcraft very often. (In fact, my World of Warcraft account is about to expire, and I have no desire to continue to renew the account or purchase a 60 Day Prepaid Game Card (although I know those options are there, I choose not to utilize them).
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