10 Shocking Incidents Where Video Games Led To Real Life Death
We used to think the idea of a game being blamed for actual violence was too extreme...
It's not uncommon for gaming to be looked down upon as this strange generation Y-specific time-consumer that sucks entire lives away, as parents and loved ones watch on helplessly. Lines like "My child was just a normal healthy teenager until they started playing that game" or "I was powerless to help as my son lived in a virtual world" are commonplace in a society that's still struggling to accept a medium where the most popular title is labelled Grand Theft Auto. But still, there's letting Skyrim swallow you up for a few hundred hours over the course of a couple of weeks, and then there's acting in a way that actually causes genuine destruction or consequence to yourself or those around you. There are plenty of studies online as to the psychological effects of gaming addiction on the brain, with one of the common causes of acting out being that the conditions the user is living in are just not preferable to the escapist fantasies of something like raiding dungeons and keeps with a host of friends across the globe. Of course that's just one genre, but it stands to reason that the more statistics developers put in games for us to manage, the more we're going to get completely engulfed in doing so. Combine that with a never-ending rush of cerebrally-pleasing visuals, and it can become a problem for some people. When an average runtime for a hardcore DOTA, Warcraft or FIFA player is in the hundreds of hours, it's nearly always all in good fun - but where do you draw the line?