Posts with tag mainstreammedia

CNN is reporting that it's happened again in China-- a man has died after a three-day gaming binge in a cyber cafe.

So many things wrong with this story. First of all, how does someone sit in an internet cafe for three days without anyone else noticing? I'm sure that it must have been a huge, 24 hour, windowless warehouse type of place, with people coming and going all the time, but still, what business would allow people to basically live in their building?

And then, of course, there's the gaming angle. Videogames and the Internet didn't kill this man, people, despite what CNN says:

The paper said that he may have died from exhaustion brought on by too many hours on the Internet.

Actually, I'm not a doctor, but I'm pretty sure he died from exhaustion brought on by staying awake for too long. If he'd been playing ping pong for three days straight, he probably wouldn't have come out of it very well either.

The article says they don't know what game he was playing, so this may not even be World of Warcraft. But while it is a very sad story, it's too bad CNN fell into the old lines of "omgz internets killed a man" instead of actually pointing out that this man made some very serious mistakes of his own.

I think MBAzeroth is right, this has to be the most clueless, uninformed piece of junk journalism ever written about World of Warcraft. And I'm including the Australian video.

You've gotta read this thing-- I don't think I could make up something so out of touch.

And World of Warcraft is the granddaddy of online communities. On one hand, it's a sprawling, seamless fantasy, where you choose an avatar -- a rogue, fighter, Mage -- and go forth in this virtual world to hack, slash and maim your way to glory.

On the other hand, it's supremely social. Players band together, chatting incessantly. They hook up for virtual drinks at the inn, share a slab of wild boar meat. They dance, they have picnics in the woods, they even share a bed on occasion.

But do they love?

That's exactly what I aimed to find out in my social experiment - without crossing that fine line into creepiness, of course. It goes without saying that the age range can be anywhere from 10 to 110 in the virtualverse. And gender identification is notoriously spotty. The idea is no more ambitious than to connect with someone in cyberspace.

So I dress my online persona for success, a slick sorcerer in a long blue robe, flowing Magely locks, and, of course, nice shoes. Footwear, I'm told, proclaims the man.

I name my avatar Prufrock -- and wade into Warcraft.

There are dozens of people running around the entry point, the old stone abbey, and chatting and obviously getting adjusted to the control scheme.

"Yay! I got my Voidwalker!" some warrior declares in the general chat window that runs along the bottom of the screen. He is, I assume, referring to some fancy piece of equipment earned in battle.

"Share a bed"? "Fighter"? And don't even get me started on the warrior/ voidwalker thing.

MBAzeroth thinks he thinks it's a dating service (and not a hack and slash), and they might not be wrong. But the craziest thing is that this guy is supposed to be a videogames journalist. He's played with a PS3, for Thrall's sake! How can you possibly be a gamer, and yet so completely clueless about what WoW is?

Of course, there is the possibility that he's trying to be funny. For someone that names their character after a T.S. Eliot poem (about a clueless loser--- oh, the irony), maybe this is what passes for a joke.