Sept 18, 2007
A man in Southern China has died of exhaustion after a three-day online gaming binge, reports Beijing News.
The 30-year old man declared dead in cyber café in the city of Guangzhou on Saturday afternoon. Paramedics on the scene tried to revive the man but failed.
The report says a hundred other net users "left the cafe in fear" after witnessing the man's death. It wasn't noted which game the man was playing, but we're sure everyone has the usual suspects in mind.
Back in 2005 a South Korean man died after playing StarCraft for 50 hours in an internet café.
Psychologist Professor Mark Griffiths told the BBC that playing excessively was "not a problem" for the majority of gamers, but warned that online addiction is becoming a phenomenon for a small minority.
"They are the types of games that completely engross the player. They are not games that you can play for 20 minutes and stop," he said.
"It is not taken seriously yet - it is the same for internet addiction."
Several clinics have already been set-up in China to treat "internet addiction," although we suspect it'll be a long time before the treatment is available to even a small portion of the country's 140 million internet users.
