11 Horrifying Examples of Video Game Addiciton

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6 – Playing a Game to Death,

A man dressed as a zombie plays video games on an Xbox One console during a midnight launch event in New York, November 21, 2013. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson (UNITED STATES - Tags: ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA BUSINESS SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY)

  • This isn’t a hyperbole, there have been numerous reports of people playing games without significant pause for so long that they die of exhaustion.
  • The most notable case of this is a 32-year-old man in Taiwan who stayed at an internet café for three days so he could play his favourite online game.
  • Earlier that year another man in Taiwan suffered the same fate after playing games for over five days in a row.
  • Don’t get me wrong, I’ve binge played a game before but I can’t imagine being so addicted to a game that I literally keep playing until death takes me.

5 – Grand Delusions,

the-collective

  • A 13 year old was so obsessed with WoW that he lost his mind, he wasn’t unintelligent as he had good grades at school, but that didn’t stop him obsessively writing an 80,000 word in-character diary about the game.
  • That isn’t what makes him delusional and clearly addicted, however, at some point he thought to himself that he couldn’t bear being apart from the characters in the game, so he left a note for his parents and jumped off a 24-story building.
  • His suicide note claimed that he had gone to join the heroes of the game that he worshipped, his parents then sued the Chinese distributor of WoW for the equivalent of 12,500 US dollars.

4 – Revenge,

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  • During the Diablo-like online RPG Legend of Mir 3’s peak, equipment was worth a lot of money, some of which sold for up to 10,000 US dollars online.
  • Zhu from China borrowed a sword from his friend, Qiu, for a while, but then when he realised its value he sold it for $1,000, needless to say his friend was incredibly angry.
  • But Qiu got so angry that he did something crazy, he stabbed Zhu ‘with great force’ in the chest and killed him, he was then sentenced to life in jail.
  • But this isn’t the only case of revenge, multiple people have been killed or injured over disputes in games, not all of them had real money behind them either, just hours and hours of playtime.

3 – Teen Murders,

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  • 16 year-old Daniel Petric got sick with a staph infection and wasn’t really able to go outside, so his friends introduced him to the Halo series, he got hooked and wanted to buy Halo 3, but his parents forbade him due to its mature rating.
  • However, he bought it anyway in secret, he clocked up to 18 hours a day and got totally addicted, but when his parents found out they took the Xbox and the game and locked it away in the safe along with their handgun.
  • David got his father’s keys and emptied its contents, he then walked up to his parents, who were sitting on the couch and told them ‘close your eyes I have a surprise for you both.’
  • He then shot both parents in the back of their heads and then tried to cover it up as a murder suicide, but his Dad survived and he was sentenced to jail.
  • David isn’t the only case of this happening, a 13 year old boy strangled and pilfered an 83 year old woman so he could pay for his WoW subscription.

2 – Infant Death by Negligence,

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  • Ever been so hooked into a game that you forget about the world around you? Me too, it’s a nice feeling being immersed into a fictional world, but when you have young children in your care you need to pay attention.
  • There’s a depressingly large amount of stories about parents being so involved with their gaming that they ignore their children for long periods of time, so much so that they die for one reason or another.
  • The causes of death vary, one man left a gun in his living room and his 3-year-old thought it was a wii toy, another left the room to play on his Gameboy Advanced while his 10-month old twins were in the tub, but sadly the usual cause is leaving kids to die a slow death.

1 – Filicide

Shutterstock - Nancy Catherine Walker
Shutterstock – Nancy Catherine Walker
  • Negligence is one thing, deliberately harming your own children because they’re taking away time from your game is another, much worse, thing.
  • When Tony Bragg heard his infant son screaming during his Everquest time he walked over to him, squeezed him and shoved him in the utility closet, he later found that he had squeezed the kid to death.
  • Tyrone Spellman thought his 17-mont-old daughter had broken his brother’s Xbox, so he did what any rational and well-adjusted human being would do, he beat her to death; he later added the following ‘That little baby’s head cracked like a walnut’.
  • Both of these men are serving long sentences in jail.

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