With all of the death a destruction that most video games tout these days, it may not be surprising after all if some of these games actually led to the real deaths of some of its players. Apparently, it isn’t the murdering car thieves or the extraterrestrial warlords or frightening skeletons with laser weapons one needs to look out for.
The real enemies can be real people and real physical conditions. Such enemies as potential blood clots, not moving your body for days and the extreme possibility that your mind may suddenly crash into psychosis because of the intensity and focus of where you are. You are, of course, not really where you are. You are in another world that isn’t real but, as these people found out, those other worlds, those fictional worlds, can quite literally kill you. So, which games have actually caused real life murder, death and mayhem?
World of Warcraft and Farmville
One of the reps that the multiplayer online role playing games have is that they can be highly addictive and tend to attract addiction prone players. Such was the case in 2006 with a young mother from New Mexico named Rebecca Christie. Seems Christie was so addicted to World of Warcraft that she was not the mother to her three year old daughter that she should have been. In the last year of her little life, the child had only gained one pound and was forced to mostly eat cat food due to her mother’s neglect for her and her addiction to WoW. One day in January of ’06, she was hard at WoW, engaged in a 15 hour marathon, when she noticed that her little daughter was lying there and not moving. After calling 911, medical examiners determined that the three year had died of starvation. Christie got 25 years in prison.
In 2011, Alexandra Tobias, 22, was so involved and so addicted to her Farmville career that nothing was going to get between her and her addiction. In fact, she murdered her three month old son because he wouldn’t stop crying while she was in the middle of a game. She picked him up and began to violently shake him and bang his head against the computer monitor until he was dead. She got 50 years for that.
Legend of Mir 3 and Everquest
In 2005, two Chinese buds, Qiu and Zhu, were hard at it in Legend of Mir 3 and they had managed together to win a coveted Dragon Sabre. Zhu, then, decided he would sell the saber on eBay and not tell his friend about it. When Qiu found out that Zhu had sold it for $870, the two fought on how it should be distributed. Qiu was not going to be denied so he stabbed his friend to death while he was asleep. Qiu got life but could get out on parole in 2020.
Everquest is notoriously famous for attracting highly addicted gamers and there are even support groups out there for these addicts. In 2002, Shawn Woolley actually quit his job because he was so addicted and simply wanted to play all of the time and a regular job was getting in the way. After not showing up for a family Thanksgiving, relatives went to find him. They found him slumped over his computer with the game still running. He had shot himself in the head and friends and family speculate it was over a love relationship in the game that had gone bad.
And then there were others. . .
There are may more, of course. Like the first recorded video game death when an 18 year old had a heart attack in 1982 from playing Bezerk for so long it actually damaged his young heart. Then there is the app called Ingress which so absorbs the player that they soon lose all consciousness of where they are. In 2014, a 16 year old in Brazil was so engaged in entering a portal in the game that he walked out into traffic and was run down by a bus. Then there is the tale of a young Irishman who was so absorbed in Ingress that he walked off a pier and drowned while in the middle of a game.
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