Here's something to scare your kids away from video games: death

by Mike Usinger on January 21st, 2015 at 3:57 PM

1 of 1 2 of 1

If you’ve got kids, you’re well aware that ripping them away from the Xbox, PlayStation, or Wii U is mission-goddamn-impossible unless they are damn good and ready to shut the things down themselves.

Standing by the TV and yelling incessantly about brain-rot, attention-deficit disorder, and the complete moral bankruptcy of Grand Theft Auto is about as pointless as complaining about the weather.

Why not, then, take a different approach: inform the disobedient little shits that we they’re doing is going to kill them.

Then cite the story of what happened to a 32-year-old from Taiwan. CNN has reported that an unemployed man obsessed with video games was found dead in an Internet cafe in the city of Kaohsiung. He had been playing online combat games for three days straight, something that he did often, sometimes sleeping in a chair between sessions.

Employees discovered him slumped on a table, his body showing signs of rigor mortis. After being taken to emergency, he was pronounced dead of cardiac arrest.

Police said: ““He has been unemployed for a long time, and internet cafes were the only place he could go to. His family said he would disappear for two to three days on end.”

CNN also reported that other customers in the cafe went right on playing their video games even as police removed the body. Odds are 99-to-1 your kids won’t give a fiddler's fart about that either, especially if they’re in the middle of a Skylanders session.

Comments

4 Comments

This is nothing new....

Jan 21, 2015 at 4:33pm

Lots of stories about this. Even in the late 90's, early 2000's people have died playing the popular FPS Counter-Strike for days on end and the same result. And lots have died from playing Starcraft also. So this isn't anything new...

Me

Jan 21, 2015 at 5:31pm

Wow, this is one angry guy writing this article. Also, Mikey, this will not scare away the "disobedient little shits" from video games. They'll keep playing it because it's what they do for fun. They may think about it for a little bit, but they'll come right back to it because no matter how bad things can be for other people, we as people tend to not let other people's troubles get us TOO down.