Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (2 page)

As someone who has spent more than a decade writing about video games, the people who make them, and the strange and curious stories that originate within and around them, I know only too well that their curious power can be difficult to explain. Game designers speak of ‘compelling mechanics,’ of ‘the play loop,’ of ‘game
balance,’ of ‘calibrating risk and reward’ and other arcane jargon. Certainly these terms and ideas can explain how games manage to keep us playing, those psychological tricks that they use to inspire compulsion. But they fail to explain the way in which video games meet our deeper, more human needs.

Death by Video Game
begins with an investigation into a slew of deaths in which young men and, occasionally, women have been found dead at their keyboards after extended periods of video-game playing.

But we’re not going to linger with the corpses. The more compelling questions are: What provoked these young people to emigrate from reality into their virtual dimensions beyond the natural limits of their well-being? What convinced their brains to ignore the physical warnings in order to keep playing a video game? And—more fundamentally—what causes billions of humans around the world (the vast majority of whom don’t wind up injured or dead) to revisit them week after week after week?

To look past the hysteria and fearmongering that has accompanied video games’ invasion of culture is to reckon with a form of entertainment whose impact on its fans is often unusually intense. This intensity occasionally veers toward danger and death, but far more often, the forms it assumes are strange, surprising, and revealing. It is that strangeness and its implications that are the deeper subject of this book.

1

CHRONOSLIP

Chen Rong-Yu died in two places at once.

At 10 p.m. on Tuesday, January 31, 2012, the twenty-three-year-old took a seat in the farthest corner of an Internet café on the outskirts of New Taipei City, Taiwan. He lit a cigarette and logged on to an online video game. He played almost continuously for twenty-three hours, stopping occasionally only to rest his head on the table in front of his monitor and sleep for a little while. Each time that he woke, he picked up his game where he’d left off. Then, one time, he did not raise his head. It was nine hours before a member of the café’s staff tried to rouse the motionless man, in order to tell him that his time was up, only to find his body stiff and cold.

Chen Rong-Yu died in two places at once. Not in the sense that during those final moments his mind drifted to another place (the landscape of some comforting memory where he might be soothed or cheered, for example). Rather, when Rong-Yu’s heart failed, he simultaneously departed two realities.

He died there in the Taiwanese café, with its peeling paint and cloying heat. And he died in Summoner’s Rift, a forest blanketed by perpetual gloom. Summoner’s Rift has the appearance of a remote, unvisited place, but each day it is frequented by hundreds of thousands of people, players of the online video game
League of Legends
,
arguably the most popular online video game in the world. Summoner’s Rift is the pitch on which they do battle.

Rong-Yu had died here many times before. He had been speared, incinerated, or otherwise obliterated by rivals as he scrambled through its thickets and across its river in an endlessly repeating game of territorial warfare.

Many games are metaphors for warfare. The team sports—football, hockey, rugby, and so on—are rambling battles in which attackers and defenders, led by their captains, ebb and flow up and down the field in a clash of will and power. American football is a series of frantic First World War–style scrambles for territory measured in ten-yard increments. Tennis is a pistol duel: squinting shots lined up in the glare of a high-noon sun. Running races are breakneck chases between predator and prey. Boxing doesn’t even bother with the metaphor: it’s a plain old fistfight ending in blood and bruise.

So it is with
League of Legends
, a game in which two teams attempt to overwhelm each other. In warfare, real or symbolic, there are inevitable casualties. To date, Rong-Yu’s deaths in the virtual forest had been symbolic and temporary, like the toppling of a pawn from a chessboard; a griefless death, easily undone. That night, however, his virtual death was mirrored in reality. It was true and final.

When the paramedics lifted Rong-Yu from his chair, his rictus-stiffened hands remained in place, as if clawed atop an invisible mouse and keyboard. Like the pulp detective thriller in which the lifeless hand points towards some crucial clue, Rong-Yu’s final pose appeared to incriminate his killer.

Yu’s story is unusual, but not unique. On July 13, 2012, another young man, nineteen-year-old Chuang Cheng Feng, was found
dead in his chair at a different Taiwanese Internet café. Feng, a five-foot-five tae kwon do champion, had settled down to play the online game
Diablo 3
after a friend he was supposed to meet failed to show up. He played the game to pass the time: ten hours of uninterrupted questing. Then, mind hazed by the room’s thick cigarette smoke and eyes stinging from the monitor’s flicks and throbs, he decided to step outside for some fresh air.

Feng stood, took three steps then stumbled and collapsed, his mouth foaming. He too was pronounced dead at the scene.

There are others. In February 2011, a thirty-year-old Chinese man died in an Internet café on the outskirts of Beijing after playing an online game for three days straight. On September 2, 2012, a forty-eight-year-old man named Liu died in Kaohsiung City following a seven-hour stint at the controller. His was the third game-related death of the year recorded in Taiwan.

In 2015, the deaths came sooner. On January 1, a thirty-eight-year-old man was found dead at an Internet café in Taipei, apparently after playing video games for five days straight. A week later, another: a thirty-two-year-old man, known as Hsieh, entered a café in Kaohsiung on January 6. Two days later employees found him slumped on the desk at which he’d been playing an online game. He was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.

In May 2015, a man in Hefei, the largest city in the Anhui province of China, reportedly collapsed after playing a game for fourteen days straight. When the paramedics arrived, one newspaper reported him as saying, ‘Leave me alone. Just put me back in my chair. I want to keep playing.’

The deaths aren’t limited to Southeast Asia, and they aren’t only contemporary.

One April evening in 1982, Peter Burkowski and a friend arrived at Friar Tuck’s Game Room and began playing
Berzerk
. Burkowski
was a top student who hoped to become a doctor. He also had a talent for arcade games. Within fifteen minutes he’d posted his initials next to two high scores on
Berzerk
’s leaderboard. Then he took four steps towards an adjacent machine, dropped a quarter into its slot, and fell dead from a heart attack.

The next day, one newspaper headline read,
VIDEO GAME DEATH
, the earliest report of its kind. Similar incidents have continued through the years.

In July 2011, a young British player, Chris Staniforth, died from a blood clot after a prolonged session at his Xbox video-game console.

‘When Chris got into a game he could play it for hours on end,’ Staniforth’s father told reporters at the time. ‘He got sucked in playing
Halo
online against people from all over the world. I’m not for one minute blaming the manufacturer of Xbox. It isn’t their fault that people use them for so long.’

Staniforth’s father absolved Microsoft, Xbox’s manufacturer, and
Halo
’s publisher, of blame for his son’s death. We are, he implied, each responsible for the way in which we spend our time. And yet, when Microsoft’s rival Nintendo launched its Wii console, it included a warning that would interrupt many of its games. It read: ‘Why not take a break?’ and was accompanied by an illustration of an open window, wind blowing the curtains inwards, calling the player outside.

Nintendo knows that video games have a certain power that encourages people to inhabit an alternative reality, where time’s passing goes unnoticed. The company’s solution is to break the fourth wall for a moment in order to offer a way out for the spellbound player.

The ‘death by video games’ story occupies a peculiar place in the modern news cycle. We don’t read of ‘death by cinema,’ ‘death by literature’ or ‘death by crossword,’ even though humans must surely have died while engaged in each of these mostly inactive pursuits. But with video games, news of a fresh tragedy arrives, usually from Asia, with grim regularity. The circumstances are always similar: a young man found dead at his keyboard, seemingly killed by an unhealthy relationship with this sedentary hobby.

For video-game players the news reports act as a cautionary tale, the kind of story mothers might tell their children to warn them off playing a hand-held game beneath the sheets after lights-out: ‘Look what might happen to you if you play a video game for too long.’ For the newspapers, often staffed and read by a generation of people who grew up at a time when video games weren’t a fixture of the cultural landscape, these tales fortify a generational distrust of the newest (and therefore most treacherous) entertainment medium.

‘Gamer lies dead in Internet cafe for 9 HOURS before anyone notices,’ wrote the
Daily Mail
’s headline writers of Rong-Yu’s death, with evident disapproval of the obliviousness of those who become absorbed in video games. Of course, Rong-Yu’s death represents a broader issue of contemporary loneliness. To be left undiscovered for more than nine hours is the kind of tragic conclusion to life that usually befalls the elderly, where the isolation of old age—the departed partner, the distant children, the dull company of daytime TV—is made explicit in death. Young people are supposed to live in vibrant company. They are supposed to be noticed when they go missing. To sit dead in a chair, in public, surrounded by people, is to inspire a news story that carries with it some of the mundane horror of contemporary life: the knowledge that, though we are packed together in cities, and through the Internet, our mobile phones, and
online video games, and are ostensibly more connected than ever before, it’s also possible to die in plain sight and for that death to go unnoticed.

This, however, was not the intended subtext of the
Daily Mail
’s story. Rather, its headline implies that not only are video games a waste of time, not only do they encourage inactivity and obesity, not only are they used by companies to market and sell products to children, not only can they distract from work and study; they also present a mortal danger. You might die while playing them.

You could also die while sprawled out on the sofa, chain-watching the latest television serial. You might also perish after a four-hundred-page Tolstoy binge, or while you endure Abel Gance’s nine-hour-long film
Napoléon
, or when caught up in an especially engaging cross-stitch pattern. People have been known to die during a twelve-hour, blood-clotting long-haul flight. Any activity that compels a human being to sit for hours on end without moving is, arguably, a mortal threat. In the 1982 Burkowski case, Mark Allen, Lake County’s deputy coroner, said, sensibly, ‘Peter could have died in a number of stressful situations. We once had a boy who had a heart attack while studying for an exam. It just happened that he died in front of a video game, but it’s also quite interesting.’

Nevertheless, video games appear to have a better hit-rate than film, literature, exams, or any of the others.

Video games, it seems, are something else.

During my first year of university, my friends and I became partially nocturnal. We’d stay up late for the 9 a.m. lectures. We’d get up early for the 9 p.m. parties. The rest of our waking hours were, as for so many students, given over to lounging in reeking halls, eating cheap pizza and playing video games. My friend Alastair provided
our gateway getaway:
Goldeneye 007
, the video-game adaptation of the 1995 James Bond film
Goldeneye
. Each night (which was, for our skewed body clocks, closer to day), we’d assemble in the front room of his shared apartment, pick teams, and then sprint through ancient cave systems, creep through Russian military bunkers, and teeter along cranes as we shot one another in a kind of armed-combat-wide game. Most nights, at around two in the morning, someone would point out that it might be time to think about ordering some food in. We’d mournfully set down the controllers and head out to the local pizza takeaway.

‘Er, guys, it looks like it might be shut,’ said Ian, as we rounded the corner on one such night.

‘Lucky Pizza is never shut,’ said Clare.

‘What time is it, anyway?’ I asked.

‘Oh,’ said Alastair. ‘It’s half past four in the morning. How did we not notice that?’

A few years later, I left my wife playing the video game
Animal Crossing
in our apartment one afternoon.

In
Animal Crossing
, you assume the role of an immigrant who moves into a rural village to build a new life. When you disembark from the train, you’re greeted by an officious raccoon, the local shop owner and landlord, Tom Nook, who offers you a small house to call your own. Once you’re settled in, you get to know the neighbours, pen virtual letters, attend local festivals, fish, net bugs, excavate fossils, buy clothes, and, of course, service your virtual mortgage. The game follows the console’s internal clock and calendar: when it’s night in your world, it’s night in
Animal Crossing
. The shops open at nine and close at six, and Christmas falls on December 25.

Despite the fact that talking animals populate the game, and
despite the fact that your work is primarily to collect fossils and catch bugs for the local museum,
Animal Crossing
mimics life’s rhythms, domestic pressures, and timetable.

When I returned home later that evening, the flat was dark except for the quivering light of the TV screen. My partner sat on the floor, exactly as I’d left her hours earlier.