The body of 23-year-old Chen Rong-yu sat in a crowded Taipei gaming center for nine hours before anyone noticed that something was amiss.
To misappropriate a meme, online gaming is serious business. How serious? Apparently serious enough that people will continue clicking away despite the presence of a decaying corpse only feet from their keyboards.
Sky News reports:
The body of Chen Rong-yu, 23, was found slumped in a chair at a cafe in New Taipei city on Tuesday night, according to local reports.
He was rigid on a chair with his hands stretched out towards the keyboard and mouse, police said.
He had been playing League of Legends.
Mr Chen’s body had apparently been sitting there for up to nine hours without any of the 30 other people in the cafe noticing.
He was last seen by a waitress talking on the phone around noon on Wednesday.
Though the investigation is ongoing, local authorities believe that Mr. Rong-yu passed away due to a pre-existing heart condition and the low temperatures of his surroundings. These two factors, along with Mr. Rong-yu’s lack of movement while playing and fatigue, may have created a blood clot, and subsequent heart attack.
While most would use this opportunity to warn gamers against the dangers of remaining stationary for extended periods of time, I think the real crux of this issue is that dozens of people failed to notice a deceased person in their midst for hours. Yeah, I get that clicking on your dudes is important, but man, where’s the spatial awareness people? Would any of these gamers have batted an eye if a fire broke out? Would they have moved aside if a car crashed through the wall?
I’m not going to jump on the “videogames are dangerously addictive” bandwagon, but I’m suddenly a bit worried about our species. There are completely immobile thorn bushes in Kenya that have better survival instincts than LAN gamers. In the event of a puma attack, we’re little more than squishy meat sacks, but at least previous generations would have thrown something heavy at the snarling beast. Now I wonder if we’d even grumble as our arms are torn off by oversized feline claws.
Published: Feb 3, 2012 08:20 pm