Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (3 page)

‘Is everything OK?’ I asked.

She turned her head stiffly, eyes hooded, as if awakening from a coma.

‘Whoa,’ she said. ‘I am cold and hungry.’

A friend of mine has coined a term for the unique way in which video games cause their players to become oblivious to time in this way: ‘chronoslip.’ It’s not a new phenomenon. We speak of becoming ‘lost in a good book,’ of ‘losing track of time,’ of ‘pastimes’ (or, originally and more explicitly, ‘passe-tymes’). The phenomenon is ancient.
Tempus fugit
, it turns out, especially while you’re having fun.

But with video games, these phrases don’t quite suffice. What book or movie could keep the average viewer’s attention for six uninterrupted hours? The titans of modern mainstream entertainment such as
Harry Potter, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, The Sopranos
, et al. may boast expansive cumulative running or reading times, but they are broken into discrete, palatable chunks. With movies and TV series, we seem to reach our consumption limits sooner than with video games, into which we can descend for ceaseless hours.

Perhaps the difference is that games are active rather than passive media. They do not temporarily suppress our free will. Rather, they demand it. We step into a game world and emerge, hours later, with little sense of where the time has gone. Sometimes the immersion is so complete that our bodies’ physical signals do not penetrate
the unreality: we forget to eat, to shift position in our chair. We neglect to keep warm, to pee. Time becomes yoked not to the ticking of the clock, but to the pattern of our interactions, the pleasing rhythms of cause and effect. In strategy games, time is divided into the number of seconds it takes to build a barracks, train a soldier, or to mine the earth for resources. Seconds and minutes have no relevance here; time is calculated in units of action. By contrast, in a puzzle game, time works like an egg timer: crack a level before your patience runs out and the timer is flipped; your store of patience is renewed.

Games achieve chronoslip because they replace the real world with a new one that moves to its own laws of physics and time. This reality engages us totally, and we synchronise with its tempo.

Video games, from the simplest card game to the most vividly rendered fantasy world, consume our attention. When we become lost in a book, we enter a state where the fabricated world and its characters seem so real and pressing that we lose all sense of time. Small wonder it’s so easy to lose oneself in a good game, where one becomes not only an eavesdropper or onlooker on a world, but also an active participant in its action and drama. Video games go further than other fiction: they revolve around us and react to our every choice and input. Just as a piano needs a pianist or a violin needs a violinist, video games are lifeless without us. They need a player in a way that a film does not need a viewer to function.

No, video games are not mere time-wasters. This label, so often and gleefully applied, implies a certain idleness on their part. Rather, they are time-killers: they destroy time. And they are accomplished killers, often leaving little trace of their handiwork; we remain oblivious to time’s passing.

Video games did not grow into the role of time-killer. They emerged, fully formed, fully capable. In his 1982 treatise on the emergent video game,
Invasion of the Space Invaders
, Martin Amis explained his first encounter with the titular Japanese arcade game, a summer romance that blossomed in a bar in the south of France during the summer of 1979.

Now I had played quite a few bar machines in my time. I had driven toy cars, toy airplanes, toy submarines; I had shot toy cowboys, toy tanks, toy sharks. But I knew instantly that this was something different, something special. Cinematic melodrama blazing on the screen, infinite firing capacity, the beautiful responsiveness of the defending turret, the sting and pow of the missiles, the background pulse of the quickening heartbeat … The bar closed at eleven o’clock that night. I was the last to leave, tired but content.

Amis then describes the video-game player’s descent into obsession.

Your work starts to suffer. So does your health. So does your pocket. The lies increase in frequency and daring. Anyone who has ever tangled with a drink or drug problem will know how the interior monologue goes. ‘I think I’ve got this under control at last. It’s perfectly okay so long as you do it in moderation …’

The addict then indulges in a wild three-hour session. ‘I’m not going to touch that stuff again,’ he vows. Twenty minutes later he is hunched once more over the screen, giving it all his back and shoulder, wincing, gloating, his eyes lit by a galaxy of strife.

You think I exaggerate? I do but only slightly. After
all, the obsession/addiction factor is central to the game’s success: you might even say that video-dependence is programmed into the computer.

The ‘obsession factor’ of which Amis speaks is something that is common to many types of game, not just those that are projected on a screen. The following excerpt is taken from an article titled ‘Chess-playing excitement,’ published in the July 2, 1859, issue of
Scientific American
.

Those who are engaged in mental pursuits should avoid a chessboard as they would an adder’s nest, because chess misdirects and exhausts their intellectual energies … It is a game which no man who depends on his trade, business or profession can afford to waste time in practicing; it is an amusement—and a very unprofitable one—which the independently wealthy alone can afford time to lose in its pursuit. As there can be no great proficiency in this intricate game without long-continued practice, which demands a great deal of time, no young man who designs to be useful in the world can prosecute it without danger to his best interests.

Like Amis, the author describes one particular player’s addict-like resolution to swear off the game.

A young gentleman of our acquaintance, who had become a somewhat skillful player, recently pushed the chessboard from him at the end of the game, declaring, ‘I have wasted too much time upon it already; I cannot afford to do this any longer; this is my last game.’ We recommend
his resolution to all those who have been foolishly led away by the present chess-excitement, as skill in this game is neither a useful nor graceful accomplishment.

In Taiwan, there have been enough café deaths that the government is no longer content with issuing mere recommendations for players to, as
Scientific American
puts it, ‘make this their last game.’ Government officials have developed measures to help curtail the amount of time that people play games: a more forceful kind of intervention than Nintendo’s gentle reminder of the great outdoors.

According to the section chief for the Economic Development Bureau of the Tainan City Government, the police routinely carry out spot checks after 10 p.m. on cafés to see whether there are any under-eighteens on the premises. During the summer holidays the local government now runs a Youth Project, which warns young people about the dangers of playing games for too long. The government is even in the process of drafting new regulations for Internet cafés that will decree when and for how long teenagers will be allowed to play on the premises. Similar legislation is already in place in South Korea where, in 2011, after a spate of similar deaths, the government introduced the Youth Protection Revision bill (sometimes known as the ‘Cinderella law’) which prohibits teenagers from playing online games in Internet cafés after midnight.

Films are awarded age ratings that dictate the age limits of those who are allowed to view them. But video games will perhaps be the first entertainment medium in history to inspire legislation with regard to how long a person is able to interact with them before taking a break.

Amis was right: games are somehow different. We consume a book, but a game consumes us. It leaves us reeling and bewildered, hungry and ghosted in the fug of chronoslip.

The Big Net café, where Chuang Cheng Feng died, is a small business in a quiet town on the rural outskirts of Tainan. It’s one of the only Internet cafés in the area. Months after the incident, the owner is unwilling to talk about what happened. The death on the premises has frightened away customers, she claims, many of whom believe that the cause of death was something to do with the café itself, rather than the amount of time Chuang Cheng Feng spent playing the game without interruption.

‘I am afraid that recent events have been catastrophic for my business,’ the café’s owner tells me via a translator on the phone. ‘It’s suffered a huge slide. I cannot talk to you about what happened. I want us to stay out of the news now.’

Internet cafés are more widespread in Taiwan than in the West. For young players, it’s more economical to play games at one of these establishments than at home. Two dollars buys eight hours of game time. Take into account the cost of a broadband connection, a PC, electricity, and the games themselves, and an Internet café is the most affordable location in which to play an online game.

Big City is one of the larger café franchises in Taiwan. I call a branch in the Yongkang district of Tainan, fifteen miles from the café where Feng died.

‘Yeah, since the news of that death, business has been different,’ says Lian, the twenty-five-year-old staff member who answers the phone. ‘It’s far quieter than usual. It seems probable to me that this downturn is somehow linked.’

‘Are you worried that the same thing that happened in Yujing might happen in your café?’ I ask.

‘Of course,’ she says.

‘Have you taken any measures to prevent a similar tragedy?’

‘Headquarters held a meeting after Feng’s death,’ Lian says.
‘After that, employees were issued with new guidelines, asking us to pay closer attention to customers. We have been told to issue a verbal warning if we notice any customer sitting at the same terminal for too long. To be honest, though, I haven’t noticed anyone behaving in the same manner as Feng did.’

A little farther north, twenty-seven-year-old Huang, branch manager of the Ingame Café, is more willing to admit that people playing games for prolonged periods of time is an issue.

‘Our business has been mostly unaffected by the recent death,’ she says. ‘We do have customers like that, who stay here for a very long time. Not many, but certainly a few. But I’m not really worried that something like that might ever happen here. We have a system to prevent customers from sitting in front of the computer for too long.’

‘How long is too long?’ I ask.

‘We don’t allow any customers to play for more than three days at a time. Once it gets past that amount of time, we ask the customer to go home, rest, and refresh. This is a well-organised Internet café, you see.’

She pauses for a moment. ‘You know what? Don’t even mention three days. In fact, I just asked a customer to leave who had been here for over twenty-four hours.’

‘Why?’ I say. ‘Was there a problem?’

‘Other customers had started to complain about his smell. So I asked him to leave. In my experience, no one tends to play a game for longer than a day and a half at a time.’

When it comes to apportioning blame for the deaths of Rong-Yu, Feng, and all the others, Miss Huang is unequivocal.

‘The problem with this sort of addiction stems from those addicts
themselves,’ she says. ‘It’s probably their family or their education that’s to blame. It’s really a matter of self-discipline.’

Since the 1970s, doctors have believed that it’s possible for a video game to trigger a heart attack in a person with a weak heart. In 1977, the cardiologist Robert S. Eliot used
Pong
to replicate stressful situations for his cardiac patients at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. He studied more than one thousand patients, monitoring the game’s effect on their heart rate and blood pressure.

‘We have had heart-rate increases of sixty beats per minute and blood pressures as high as 220 within one minute of starting a computer game,’ he said at the time. ‘It happens quite a lot, but the patients have no awareness.’

In fact, Peter Burkowski’s autopsy in 1982 found that the young man had scar tissue on his heart that was at least two weeks old. The coroner recorded that the stress of the arcade games Burkowski had been playing triggered the attack in his weakened heart, lending credence to Dr. Eliot’s claims.

If Rong-Yu’s death was, as Miss Huang believes, a failing of self-discipline or some other nonbiological defect, then it’s important to establish that his heart attack wasn’t due to a pre-existing medical condition.

Dr. Ta-Chen Su is the attending physician and clinical associate professor at the Department of Internal Medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital. The number of cases of young men dying while playing games is too few to have inspired any specific research into the phenomenon. But Su has a personal interest in the subject: Rong-Yu was his patient.

The NTUH is housed in a grand redbrick building, fronted by pairs of Doric columns that bite into the pavement by the side of a Taipei main road. Outside, the oily scent of traffic hangs in the air, while the interior is all disinfectant and white fluorescent lighting.

‘It wasn’t reported, but last year Chen had a heart attack and was transferred to the hospital for evaluation,’ Dr. Su tells me. ‘During his hospitalisation the checks included echocardiography, twenty-four-hour electrocardiography, cardiac catheterization, coronary angiography, and cardiac electrophysiology.’

But the test results showed no signs that Rong-Yu had a heart problem that might lead to sudden death. The young man’s unexpected heart attack was something of a mystery. Rong-Yu refused the doctor’s recommendation to have a cardioverter-defibrillator fitted. Moreover, when he discovered that there was nothing wrong with his heart, he declined to have any more cardiovascular tracking, which might have explained the attack. Three months later, Rong-Yu was dead.

‘As we can eliminate any pre-existing heart problems from his cause of death, he must have died from another cause,’ says Su.