Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (4 page)

Dr. Su believes that there are multiple possible causes of death for Rong-Yu, as for the other people who have died while playing video games in Internet cafés.

‘Acute autonomic dysfunction is the first potential cause of death,’ he says. ‘Video games can generate a great deal of tension in the human body. The player’s blood pressure and heart rate rise. If this excessive tension is maintained for more than ten hours, it can result in cardiac arrhythmia and sympathetic-parasympathetic imbalance, also called acute autonomic dysfunction.’

Video games deal in tension and peril. This is true of most fiction, in which conflict is necessary to create drama, but in most
video games the player is the subject of the stress and conflict. The conflict is necessary for the sense of triumph, release and learning that comes when it’s overcome. But Dr. Su warns that this cycle of stress and release, when prolonged, can have physiological effects.

‘Even if the game is not especially stressful in this way, simply playing for such a long period of time can prove fatal,’ he adds.

Dr. Su compares playing games for days at a time to putting in unhealthy amounts of overtime at work—something that leads to exhaustion of the mind and body.

In Japan, enough people have died at their desks while working overtime that the Japanese invented the term
karōshi
, or death by overwork. In 1987, the Japanese Ministry of Labour even began to publish statistics on
karōshi
. The International Labour Organization (ILO), a United Nations agency that deals with labour issues, has published an article on the phenomenon, warning that all-night, late-night, or holiday work for long and excessive hours can lead to a worker’s death. If death at the work-station is a frequent and well-documented occurrence, then death at the PlayStation appears to be the flipside of the same coin.

The third potential cause of Rong-Yu’s death, according to Dr. Su, is what doctors refer to as ‘Economy Class Syndrome.’

‘Many studies show that maintaining the same pose for hours at a time without moving your body, especially your legs, can cause deep vein thrombosis,’ he explains. ‘Moreover, if you don’t drink and eat properly while in this position, your blood can become sticky, leading to a pulmonary embolism and sudden death.’

The final potential cause of death is linked to the cafés themselves, specifically their conditions. Taiwanese Internet cafés typically have poor ventilation and offer players only a cramped space to play in. One recent study found that the air-pollution index in Internet cafés often exceeds safe levels. Most establishments have
dedicated smoking zones on the premises, but while air conditioners cool the air temperature, they don’t improve its quality.

Taiwan in particular is a humid country. Relative humidity usually remains at 60 to 90 percent, conditions that help fungi, bacteria, and dust mites to flourish in a confined space. According to Dr. Su, these can stimulate asthma and other allergic syndromes. Severe air pollution can have a devastating impact on a human’s heart and blood vessels, increasing the possibility of blood clots, raising the heart rate and blood pressure, stiffening the arteries and having a negative impact on haemodynamics.

None of this explains the apparent rise in these deaths, however.

‘It’s because more and more Internet cafés are opening and the number of people taking up online gaming is increasing,’ says Dr. Su. ‘The content of online gaming is improving and growing more attractive than ever. I believe that, if café conditions don’t change, we are going to see more deaths.’

Rong-Yu’s death is a whodunnit of sorts. It’s not an event that can be easily pinned on any one person or thing. There’s Taiwan’s local economy and infrastructure, which promotes the extended use of Internet cafés. There are the natural conditions of the country’s humid climate. There’s the lack of regulation with regard to how long people can use these cafés and, of course, there are the video games themselves, which promote prolonged engagement through their elegant, compelling design, often iterated upon hundreds of times to inspire humans to willingly offer their uninterrupted attendance and attention.

But there is another, more pressing, more interesting question that arches over all of these, one that is, perhaps, more relevant to the billions of people around the world who play video games and don’t wind up dead from doing so: whydunnit?

What is it about this medium that encourages some people to play games to the extremes of their physical well-being and beyond? Why do video games inspire such monumental acts of obsession? Is it something within the games’ reality that proves so appealing, or is it external circumstances that push certain people to take refuge in a cosy unreality?

Games offer conflict within safe bounds, so perhaps it has to do with the human desire to be heroic, to perform acts for which they might be remembered, to stave off death’s great whitewash.

Or is it the competitiveness of the athlete: the desire to win and assert dominance over our peers and rivals? Or is it to do with friendship and community, or showboating and braggadocio?

Video games offer the intrigue and joy of solvable mysteries. They also grant access to mysterious places in need of discovery. Through them we have the opportunity to, like our ancestors, become explorers when Google satellites have mapped every inch of our own world, leaving few places where we can truly explore the unseen.

Glory, justice, immortality; a chance to live over and over again in order to perfect our path, a place in which change and growth in us are measured on the irrefutable high-score table. Video games offer all of this and more. The allures of the video game, and the ways in which it salves our internal problems and instincts, are myriad.

Is it so curious that a person might become forever lost in this rift between the real and the unreal?

2

SUCCESS

It’s 11 o’clock on a Saturday night and London’s drunk.

She gets like this from time to time, usually on the weekend. Sometimes the booze manifests itself in shouts and swagger, in fist-fights spewed out through bar doors onto the pavement. Tonight, though, the city’s wrapped in a gentle sort of inebriation, an exaggerated swaying on the train ride home, her eyes clenched shut with concentration:
Down, stomach—down
.

The Trocadero, one of the capital’s few remaining amusement arcades, is a short walk from Piccadilly Circus’s bright lights and slogans. A hen party, all crooked tiaras and bleared mascara, totters past the giant double doors: these stretched escalators and polished floors are no place for cocktails on high heels. Inside, rows of arcade machines buzz and bleep, attract mode sequences beckoning the curious with the promise of pixel adventure. Teenagers stand idly by with a studied nonchalance. They glance at player performances here and there with self-conscious dispassion.

Arcades like this are video gaming’s public installations, a shared focal point for performance and drama in front of an impromptu assembled audience. It was in such a venue that the medium made its public debut when Atari founder Nolan Bushnell installed his first arcade cabinet,
Computer Space
, in the Dutch Goose bar near Stanford University in 1971. The video game—a homeless invention that
previously never had a natural location to call its own—flourished in public. A year after
Computer Space
’s arrival, Al Acorn, one of Atari’s first employees, was called to Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, where a
Pong
location-test machine had malfunctioned. On arrival, Acorn opened the coin box to issue himself free credits for testing, only to be showered with coins. The game had proved so popular that the coin mechanism had seized.

The moneymaking heyday is gone. Video-game arcades are dismissed by most as relics of a bygone era, remainders of a pastime that has little relevance to the medium’s contemporary landscape. In a sense that’s true. The value of the arcade was, for many, in providing a road map to interactive technology’s future, a sparkling promo for the destinations to which home-based video games would arrive in a few years’ time. Then, as console manufacturers closed that technological gap, it grew more difficult to draw players from the comfort of their homes. People didn’t get out so much, when it came to video games. Today arcades have mostly vanished, the industry that fathered video games mostly forgotten by young players.

The tragedy is that arcades came to symbolise technical prowess. This focus became their destruction, because it ignored their true power and appeal, their ability to bring a crowd together to watch a masterly performance. Video games are closer to music than film in this regard. Games and music both allow their performers to interpret the experience that the creator devised, adding personal inflections and character to make the piece their own. They allow their players to accent, to flex, to showboat, to be virtuosi. In this sense, arcades were the public venues for video-game performance, where skilled players could show off their talent to a watching crowd.

Upstairs, to the right of the central escalator that runs like a spinal column up from the Trocadero’s entrance to the building’s summit, there is a
Dance Dance Revolution
cabinet. First released in 1998, this is a game that’s played not with one’s fingers and thumbs, but with one’s feet. Players must step in time to the music that blares from the machine’s speakers, pressing down on one of four arrows on the floor in front of the cabinet, copying the on-screen directions as if reading a formative kind of musical notation. The premise is simple, but mastery is hard-won. Everyone’s first time with the game descends into an awkward tussle of limbs, partly hilarious, partly humiliating. The muscle memory required to conquer the streams of directional inputs extends across your whole body—and until you’ve built the necessary skills, it’s easy to trip over your feet and end up in a heap on the floor.

In London, the machine still holds pride of place, dominating the scene with its bulk and noise. The coin mechanism is yet to jam from overuse, but it must still be the operator’s highest-earning machine to warrant such a valuable location.

On this particular night a crowd of teenagers and young twenty-somethings loiter around the machine. They are not here to play. They are here to perform and to be performed for. The rows of teenagers ripple out from the spectacle at their centre, eyes fixed on the two alpha teens perched with their elbows on the machine’s rest bars. As the flurry of beats stabs the air through the machine’s oversized speakers, their legs spasm, bodies twisting in staccato rhythm with the game’s directional arrows. The game judges their rhythmic timing with on-screen pronouncements: ‘Perfect,’ ‘Perfect,’ ‘Very Good,’ ‘Perfect.’ It might not be dancing in the strict sense—more foot-controlled Simon Says—but it dazzles.

The song ends with the crack of a processed snare, and both men step down from the platform, sweating and panting but also
smirking at their accomplishment and, more important, the attention their performance has received. Both walk away with a kind of slow-motion bluster, seeking to hide any trace of exertion, pretending this is the most natural thing in the world and what-the-hell-are-you-staring-at-anyway?

Now a short, plump man in his late thirties steps forward. He wears tight jeans crowned by a bright orange fanny-pack slung over his hip: a holster for the tools of tourism containing, presumably, camera, hotel key card, and passport.

His walk is affected, as if he’s trying to blend with the group around him, but his awkwardness betrays his otherness. There is an audible inhalation from the crowd as he adds his coin to the line of game reservations resting at the bottom of the screen. Spectators’ eyes meet for the first time: is this guy for real?

Five minutes later, it is his turn. He steps to the platform with a heavy foot and the buzz rises in intensity, the crowd all whisper and jostle.

In
Dance Dance Revolution
, there are a number of ways you can play. The most straightforward is ‘single,’ during which you step in time to the music over just the four directional arrows of a compass. Up, down, left and right. There is space on the platform for two players to do this simultaneously, playing side by side against each other, each on their own four-arrowed section. For those who are exceptionally talented, rehearsed, or naive, it is possible to play ‘double,’ whereby you must step in complicated patterns over both sides of the platform, with no fewer than eight potential positions for your feet, as if performing the dances of two people simultaneously. In this scenario, the rhythmic shower of directional commands snakes across the machine, and the whole exercise becomes much more physical, as players must move their bodies across a wider area in an effort to hit the pads in sequence.

As the man selects to play across both sets of pads on the game’s toughest song, the crowd’s buzz carries a single question: is this man talented or rash? More than half the watchers presume he’s blindly picking options that he doesn’t understand. No one considers the truth: this fumbling, pausing, and scratching-of-the-head is a kind of pantomime, baiting the audience for a switch that will happen seconds later as he finally begins to dance.

For the next eight or so minutes the crowd watches agog, immovable, exchanging smiles, nods, and head-shaking disbelief with one another. The dancer never misses a beat. ‘Perfect,’ ‘Perfect,’ ‘Perfect.’ Then, at the climax of his performance, the man, glistening and portly, jumps from the machine with a slim smile and tears off down the escalator.

The crowd dissipates into the cold night outside, smiling to itself, drunk on wonder.

Dance Dance Revolution
makes the performative aspect of video games obvious. As players twist and tap in time with the music, their skill is as evident as that of the leaping athlete (and, like the athlete or musician,
Dance Dance Revolution
masters are not born but made; they too must rehearse and practise behind closed doors, acquiring the muscle memory and technique). But, like any video game that scores players on their performance,
Dance Dance Revolution
has an element of competition. The high-score table, which ranks players according to their best performance, acts like a thrown gauntlet: play me, get good, and, just maybe, your name will be recorded here, among the greats. Video games, in their scores, levels, and trophies, offer a neat numerical readout of a person’s skill, effort, and achievement. Progress and improvement can be measured cleanly and clearly, as you top the rankings in a
Call of Duty
match
or reach the next level in
Space Invaders
. And on this battlefield you are able to compete for hours without physically tiring, as you might in a game of football.