The Shining Source

From today's free "Metro" paper here:

When a girl died after a marathon session playing her favourite computer game, fellow devotees paid her the ultimate tribute.
Hundreds went online and staged a virtual funeral for her.
They directed their characters to a cathedral in the World of Warcraft fantasy game and spoke in memory of her. The digital characters could be seen kneeling in rows, heads bowed.
The player, known only as Snowly, died last month after playing the game for three days with barely a break during a week-long national holiday in China.
Her online friends said she had one of the highest attendance rates in the game. But days before she died, Snowly complained of feeling exhausted as she prepared for a particularly difficult stage of the challenge.
Weeks later, a second gamer, who nicknamed himself Thereafter, died in similar circumstances.
The deaths are the latest in a growing number of tragedies related to excessive games-playing in Asia.
They have sparked a flood of Internet postings from concerned fellow gamers. One player, calling himself Charlie [he probably has a tattoo on his arm - James], said: "Some players really do play the game for three or four days without rest, and they barely eat."
Another, Trevor Hill, revealed: "I've stayed up and only got three hours a night for the first year of law school.
What the heck does someone have to do to die from fatigue? She must have had no sleep at all for over a week."
Chinese authorities now want to impose restrictions on how long gamers can play online.
A three-hour limit is to be introduced next year. Several games makers have agreed also to install "anti-obsession" systems to prevent more deaths.

Then there's just general stuff about WoW, and the usual insert box about how games are addictive, from someone who's probably never even played one. Still, it's a bloody brilliant article, especially the last two paragraphs. Talk about infringing your human rights - if someone wants to play for a week straight without sleeping, why can't they? It's their life. Fuckers.

PS Another great story on the same page is "Need a new liver? Well, soon you could be able to print one out." Brilliant.

I love Metro! It's quite brilliant here as well, especially the columns .

Did you know that Theo van Gogh used to be a columnist in the Dutch Metro? Perhaps that is a bit of an indicator of how extreme those columns are sometimes .

By the way, I really like the fact that they organized a virtual funeral. She was so virtualized, that this probably meant more to her than a real one...

I picked up another Metro today, for what reason I'm not entirely sure. There's something about a heated bra, sex between teachers and pupils "not all bad" and a big picture of a big robot that looks like a Cyberman. Nothing that interesting.

I didn't know about Theo van Gogh, actually. I never read the Metro editorials here because I'm only interested in stories about games and weird stuff, I suppose

How can you play a game for even a 24 hour period? I mean wouldn't you fall asleep or get hungry or just plain bored after awhile?

How do you actually die from that anyway? Not eating or drinking?

omg thats so sad   i mean... not even changing game once in a while??? loser lol but seriously i can't believe people get THAT addicted... it's just a game for god's sake   :evil:

You definitely can get that addicted, as to spend several days on.

I'm not so sure on how they managed to stay awake after the first 48 hours, perhaps practise.  The feeling to keep playing would be particularly strong in a game like WoW I'm guessing.

My only trouble is with the dying at that point.  I'd say this also was to do with practise.  Too much fatigue, running your body on adrenaline for too long, and it's bound to give up sometime.

Imagine the poor player who had just decaptitated her and stole her belongings to find out the next day she really died from it.

ahahahaha thats so bad  :lol:

This actually reminds me of an anime series called .\\Hack:Sign which has a similar part of the main plot.