Crestfallen Studios

LA Times wrote:Gamers Rack Up Losses
# In ultrawired South Korea, some people don't know when to leave the cyber cafe. For one obsessed man, the fantasy was fatal.

By Barbara Demick, Times Staff Writer

TAEGU, South Korea — By day, Lee Seung Seop was a skinny guy with glasses who wore a gray polyester uniform in his job as a repairman of industrial boilers.

But after work let out at 6 p.m., he would take off his uniform and head to a nearby Internet cafe. There, the 28-year-old would enter a far more enticing virtual world populated by saber-toothed dragons and purple-haired women in metallic bodices.
Gradually the evenings stretched into nights and the nights into the dawning of the next day. Lee sometimes forgot to eat. He didn't sleep. He came into work later and later until his boss finally fired him.

One night, after a 50-hour binge playing an online game called "World of Warcraft," Lee collapsed and fell off his chair. He died a few hours later.

"He was so concentrated on his game that he forgot to eat and sleep. He died of heart failure brought on by exhaustion and dehydration," said Park Young Woo, a psychiatrist at Taegu Fatima Hospital, where Lee died.

Certainly, more people drop dead while eating dinner or having sex than playing online games. But Lee's death this month gained widespread notoriety, bolstering creeping fears among South Koreans that they've become hooked on the Internet.

South Korean authorities have linked several high-profile deaths to excessive Internet game playing. Some believe that cyber cafes have in effect become the opium dens of the 21st century, luring players into staying around the clock in disregard for their health and responsibilities.

In May, a 4-month-old girl left alone at home in Inchon died of suffocation while her parents were playing at an Internet cafe.

"We were thinking of playing for just an hour or two and returning home as usual, but the game took longer that day" — that's how a policeman was quoted in newspapers paraphrasing the parents. The couple were charged with involuntary manslaughter, police said.

Authorities seem mindful that they have a social problem in the making. This month, the government-run Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity and Promotion began sending psychologists into cafes to warn players of the dangers. Players also are being handed questionnaires asking, for example, "Do you sometimes wish that what is happening in the games was your reality?"

Son Eun Suk, one of the psychologists visiting the cafes, believes that online gaming is potentially a bigger social problem than drugs or booze because people are unaware of its addictiveness.

"Parents and teachers lecture against drugs and alcohol, but they are very open to the Internet. They think their children are learning something about computers, and they allow them to play from a very young age," Son said.

South Korea boasts of being the most wired country in the world. Nearly three-quarters of its households have broadband connections, whereas the United States remains in the comparative Dark Ages, at about one-third. Forrester Research, a technology research firm in Massachusetts, doesn't expect the U.S. to reach South Korea's level of connectedness until at least 2010.

But by dint of their status in cyberspace, South Koreans may be providing the rest of the world with a scary glimpse of the future.

"What Korea is experiencing we might all be experiencing soon," said Edward Castronova, an Indiana University economist and author of the forthcoming "Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games."

"This poor man's death could be a harbinger of just how powerful this fantasy world could become for many of us," Castronova said.

The most seductive games are known in the industry as massively multiplayer online role-playing games, in which more than 100,000 people around the globe can play at the same time.

In these virtual worlds, participants make friends and form alliances. Each creates an online persona who develops skills and can climb the social ladder — from serf to knight, say, medieval Europe being one of the more popular themes — and acquire virtual treasures such as a magic sword or castle.

South Korea's online gaming industry brings in revenue of $1.2 billion a year and has been growing about 25% annually, according to the trade association in Seoul. The country is pushing exports of its games to the United States, China, Japan and other markets.

Online gaming is taken seriously enough here that there are two cable channels devoted to the activity, professional players and "e-sport" tournaments. The best known is the World Cyber Games, which South Korea's Samsung Electronics has sponsored since 2000.

Teenr0cker wrote:"We have come forth on this sad day to remember our beloved friend, who tragically died after being interrupted by ninjas while he had been performing his skydiving hardcore sex feat with a supermodel that didn't have an eating disorder, but was still fuckin hot. If it be any slight consolation, I have been told that he managed to kill two ninjas and disable six before that fatal midair Matrix style bullet fight broke out. Sadly, he learned that he was not 'the one'. He remained alive after sustaining 12 shots, 2 to the head, and several in the heart, but finally died by ninja stars"

Strayed Wanderer wrote:wait... there is a person who hasn't played WoW for 50 hours straight? News to me.

Sage: I want that last hour of my life back.