What happens when we lose track of ourselves and put too much into playing videogames? Chronoslip – and potentially fatal consequences
Chen Rong-Yu died in two places at once.
At 10pm on Tuesday, January 31, 2012, the 23-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 into an online videogame. He played almost continuously for 23 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 videogame League Of Legends, arguably the most popular online videogame 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 one another. 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 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, 19-year-old Chuang Cheng Feng, was found dead in his chair at a different Taiwanese Internet café. Feng, a five-foot-five taekwondo champion, had settled down to play the online game Diablo III 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 30-year-old Chinese man died at an Internet café on the outskirts of Beijing after playing an online game for three days straight. On September 2, 2012, a 48-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 38-year-old man was found dead at an Internet café in Taipei, apparently after playing videogames for five days straight. A week later another: a 32-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 14 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.
In April 1982 an 18-year-old American man, Peter Burkowski, walked into Friar Tuck’s Game Room, a popular videogame arcade in Calumet City, Illinois. According to the arcade’s owner, Tom Blankly, Burkowski and a friend arrived at 8.30pm and began playing Berzerk. Burkowski was a top student who hoped to become a doctor. He also had a talent for arcade games. Within 15 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 collapsed 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 named Chris Staniforth died from a blood clot following a prolonged session at his Xbox 360.
“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 videogames 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 videogames’ 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 any one of these mostly inactive pursuits. But with videogames, 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 videogame players, the news reports act as a cautionary tale, the kind of story mothers might tell their children to warn them off playing a handheld game beneath the sheets after lights out: “Look what might happen to you if you play a videogame for too long.” For the newspapers, often staffed and read by a generation of people who grew up at a time when videogames weren’t a fixture on the cultural landscape, these tales fortify a generational distrust of the newest (and therefore most treacherous) entertainment medium.
“Gamer lies dead in Internet café 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 videogames. 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 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 videogames, 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 videogames 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 400-page Tolstoy binge, or while you endure Abel Gance’s nine-hour-long film Napoleon, or when caught up in an especially engaging cross-stitch pattern. People have been known to die during a 12-hour, bloodclotting 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 videogame, but it’s also quite interesting.”
Nevertheless, videogames appear to have a better hitrate than film, literature, exams or any of the others.
Videogames, 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 9am lectures. We’d get up early for the 9pm parties. The rest of our waking hours were, as with so many students, given over to lounging in reeking halls, eating cheap pizza and playing videogames. My friend Alastair provided our gateway getaway: Goldeneye 007, the videogame adaptation of the 1995 James Bond film. 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 each other 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 videogame 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.
“Is everything OK?” I asked.
She turned her head stiffly; eyes hooded, as if awakening from a coma.
“Woah,” she said. “I am cold and hungry.”
A friend of mine has coined a term for the unique way in which videogames 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 videogames, 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 entertain ment such as Harry Potter, Star Wars 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 videogames, 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.
Videogames, from the simplest card game through 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 we become not only an eavesdropper or onlooker on a world, but an active participant in its action and drama. Videogames 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, videogames are lifeless without us. They need a player in a way that a film does not need a viewer to function.
No, videogames 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.
Videogames did not grow into the role of time-killer. They emerged, fully formed, fully capable. In his 1982 treatise on the emergent videogame, 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 11 o’clock that night. I was the last to leave, tired but content.”
Amis then describes the videogame 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 OK 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 entitled ‘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 put 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 10pm on cafés to see whether there are any under-18s 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 videogames 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 bewil dered, 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 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, 15 miles from the café where Feng died.
“Yeah, since the news of that death, business has been different,” says Lian, the 25-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, 27-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 24 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 videogame 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 1,000 patients, monitoring the game’s effect on their heart rate and blood pressure.
“We have had heart rate increases of 60 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 non-biological defect, then it’s important to establish that his heart attack wasn’t due to a preexisting 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, 24-hour electrocardiography, cardiac catheterisation, 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 preexisting heart problems from his cause of death, he must have died from another cause,” says Su.
Dr Su believes that there are multiple possible causes of death for Rong-Yu, as for the other people who have died while playing videogames in Internet cafés.
“Acute autonomic dysfunction is the first potential cause of death,” he says. “Videogames 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 then ten hours, it can result in cardiac arrhythmia and sympathetic-parasympathetic imbalance, also called acute autonomic dysfunction.”
Videogames deal in tension and peril. This is true of most fiction, in which conflict is necessary to create drama, but in most videogames 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 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 ‘karoshi’, or death by overwork. In 1987 the Japanese Ministry Of Labour even began to publish statistics on karoshi. 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 workstation 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 per cent, 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 a crime 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 videogames 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 videogames 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 wellbeing and beyond? Why do videogames inspire such monumental acts of obsession? Is it something within the game’s 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 is to do with the human desire to be heroic, to perform acts for which they might be remembered, a way 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?
Videogames 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 again in order to perfect our path, a place in which change and growth in us are measured in the irrefutable highscore table. Videogames offer all of this and more. The allures of the videogame, 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?