From Sportsseoul.com. This question mark clipart looks to have become obligatory in Korean articles this year.
In what is sure to spawn even more "news of the weird" articles out of South Korea, the Korea Times writes about a college student in Ulsan who died after nearly twelve hours of online gaming.
On Monday afternoon in a PC bang in the southeastern city of Ulsan, the collegian, only identified as Moon, suddenly fell to the ground and was rushed to a hospital but he was declared dead upon arrival, police said.
The 19-year-old collegian went to the PC bang at around 2 a.m., stopped by his home briefly at 10:30 a.m., to eat, and returned to the PC bang.
His families and friends told the police that he habitually played the online shooting game.
In March, after the death of a baby at two internet-addicted parents made headlines, I shared a couple other recent examples of internet use taken to extremes, as that story and others drew attention to the problem of internet addiction in South Korea. Probably the best-known example, historically, is out of Gwangju, where a young man died after 86 hours at a PC방 in 2002.
4 comments:
after only twelve hours? the kid must have had some other ongoing health issues.
Yeah, probably.
Yeah, 12 hours of gaming isn't enough, especially if he was actually eating and drinking at some point.
I wonder what the sudden-death rate is for college age males, anyway?
Blaming his death on gaming might be a perfect example of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy - we ought to expect a couple of collegians to drop dead for no apparent reason every year, and given that gaming is a favorite use of time, a good fraction of those deaths would be while or after gaming.
I myself have played video games for longer than 12 hours before in one day. Something else must have been wrong with him. 12 hours is unhealthy, but it can't kill you.
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