13-year-old Chinese boy commits suicide after playing "Warcraft"
I just saw a news story about a young boy in China who jumped out a window after playing "World of Warcraft" for 36 hours. He suicide note said something about him wanting to join his online heros. The parents are suing the distributor of the game, but not the company who wrote and maintains it.
One thing they want to do:
"His parents' suit also calls on the distributor to put a warning on the game's packaging saying 'playing games excessively harms health,' the report said."
Is that really necessary? You would think a 13-year-old would be able to figure that one out. Whenever I hear stories of people killing themselves, or sometimes others, after playing games (online multi-player games, D&D, or whatever), I always wonder if there wasn't something else going on in their lives that caused the problem. If it wasn't games that set them off, something else would have. Computer games don't make normal healthy people do things like that.
And no one noticed a boy sitting in front of a computer for 36 hours?! No one kicked him off?
I'm sorry for the parents' loss, but I don't think this lawsuit is going to solve anything.
-- C.
One thing they want to do:
"His parents' suit also calls on the distributor to put a warning on the game's packaging saying 'playing games excessively harms health,' the report said."
Is that really necessary? You would think a 13-year-old would be able to figure that one out. Whenever I hear stories of people killing themselves, or sometimes others, after playing games (online multi-player games, D&D, or whatever), I always wonder if there wasn't something else going on in their lives that caused the problem. If it wasn't games that set them off, something else would have. Computer games don't make normal healthy people do things like that.
And no one noticed a boy sitting in front of a computer for 36 hours?! No one kicked him off?
I'm sorry for the parents' loss, but I don't think this lawsuit is going to solve anything.
-- C.
posted by Cerpicio at 9:10 AM
1 Comments:
I agree with you Cerpicio. It's like, "My son died playing with his illegal, unregistered gun collection, after firing it near his head."
How about suing Ozzy Osbourne for "Suicide Solution", circe 1980s. What the? Okay, a person choices death because it serves two main purposes:
termination of painful stimuli (sometimes neglect borne bordom, depression)
attention-getting (albeit, theoretical, since the person isn't living to experience the high of people feeling pain for the loss)
The game didn't prompt the kid to kill himself. If he was always dying and was feeling to be a failure in life and thousands of times over in virtual life, then his out was earlier than some. He took no one with him.
I can imagine how many times I would have had to kill myself after dying and failing at Zork, Gauntlet, Xenophobe ... do I sound sympathetic?
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