Just Finished Reading: Death By Video Game – Tales of Obsession from the Virtual Frontline by Simon Parkin (FP: 2015)

In early 2012 a young gamer at an Internet café in Taiwan was found dead at his station. He had in fact died nine hours before discovery after a marathon gaming session. He had, apparently, died of a heart attack without anyone noticing. Apart from the lax overview by the café itself the reason why the youngster had died in that way became a media sensation. But he was neither the first nor the last youth who would die this way. The question which intrigued many, including the author, was what would motivate anyone to game so long and so intently that they would put their own physical well-being at the ultimate risk. So he went to find out.

Since there earliest incarnation’s computer/video games has been designed to be compulsive. With the advent of coin operated gaming machines in arcades across the world this compulsiveness moved into high gear. The more addictive a game was the more money it would make in the arcades – simple. This quality, using techniques like micro-rewards and other endorphin releasing methods, moved on-line in massive multi-player games (MMO’s) like Everquest and World of Warcraft (and countless others) with level and power ups, loot boxes, rare drops and high demand rare items. You could literally lose yourself in the game. That was the whole point. These were not the kind of games that you could drop into for the odd 20 minutes. They required dedication, staying power, investment if you wanted to progress along quest chains and show off your latest armour or spell to friends and enemies alike.

But a simple addiction to reward can’t explain everything – and it doesn’t. Gaming to death goes deeper – much deeper. Games offer places that are, ironically, safer than the real world. In places even as violent as Call of Duty (CoD) you know the rules and the rewards that come your way are because of your skill and persistent effort. With time and some skill a kid you’d hardly notice in the halls or the Mall could be a holy terror on the battlefield. A kid or even an adult that you wouldn’t even glance at the first time might, online, be a clan leader known across the world. Online a nobody could become a somebody and that’s worth putting in the hours. But not only can you be ‘someone’ online you can be even better than that. Online you can even be yourself – your true self – someone that no one IRL (In Real Life) has ever seen including the player themselves. Online you can find out who you are. You can play a role in a safe environment. You can play with gender and other roles and try each on for size.

The authors looks at these reasons and others to explain why people can sit at a computer for hours or even days at a time being someone else and being somewhere else. He makes a lot of very good points and a lot I agreed with. I have lost myself in games more than once – wondering after hours exploring and fighting why my eyes hurt and why I *desperately* needed to pee – seeing that six hours had gone by in the flash and it was 3am. I still think of some of my WoW characters and miss them as if they were friends or family members. My gaming buddies still laugh, many years after we stopped playing CoD together, at our exploits online and our favourite kills or even our best deaths. That sense of community is another reason why, in these isolated times (even before the Pandemic), people go and stay online sometimes far longer than is good for them.

If you’ve ever wondered what a friend or your child sees in online gaming (or just gaming in general) then this book will provide a lot of answers. If you’re a gamer as I have been since the early 1970’s (yes, that’s not a typo) it will validate what you already know and give you some ammunition in the next debate you have about all that time you ‘waste’ away from the so-called real world. Recommended.