Some games are hard to unplug fromWelcome to VideoGamer.com's Monday Morning Rant, our regular feature where one of the team gets to vent their spleen on anything that annoys them about the wonderful world of gaming. No subject, no matter how taboo, will be free from our cutting comment and vicious vitriol. Got that Monday morning feeling? Read on, and brace yourself for a wake-up call.
Normally in VideoGamer.com's Monday Morning Rant it's the games, developers and publishers who are the subject of our magnificent moaning. But not this week. This week, it's you lot, the gamers, who get it.
Well, not all of you. In fact, hardly any of you. I'm talking about the teeniest minority here. But it's an important minority, one that highlights just how bad things can go when people lose sight of what's really important - life.
Last week, it emerged that a Hong Kong father left his seven-year-old daughter standing on the street while he pumped cash into a video game arcade. When I read this story I was disgusted.
Unfortunately, this case is not an isolated incident. There have been several high-profile incidents, usually involving massively-multiplayer games, where people have completely lost the ability to separate their gaming life from their real life - and real people have suffered.
I remember reading about someone who just died while playing a game at an Internet café in Asia. He just died. And I remember hearing about some guy who murdered his mate because he nicked his virtual sword in-game. And, perhaps most shocking of all, I remember reading about a couple who neglected their kid to the point where it died because they were too wrapped up in a game.
MMOs make the headlines, but you can become addicted to all kinds of games.I'm not scaremongering here. The number of cases we know about involve such a small proportion of the global gaming public that it's almost as rare an occurrence as lightning striking twice in the same place. But these are the cases when things go very, very bad. They are news because they are so shocking and disturbing. Bad news is good news as they say.
But we all take it just a little too far occasionally, don't we? I'm not saying we go as far as to get completely embroiled in a video game that we neglect our children. But can we all say that we haven't neglected our responsibilities at some point because of video games?
I myself have done it. I took a good half year off work to play World of Warcraft when it first came out. I started getting into debt, I started running my body down, started worrying my family and almost ruined my eight-year relationship with my partner - for good.
Now there's nothing wrong with those classic late night gaming sessions and those weekend marathons - I still and always will love just losing myself in a video game to the point where nothing else matters and I'm enveloped in fun. But I unplug. It's not just good for the soul, it's essential.
Here's one story, kind of funny, kind of worrying. I was staying with a mate of mine in Ireland. This mate is massive into WoW, and as I was drifting off to sleep, I could see him stuck in his chair playing the game, at what must have been something like three in the morning. He had been sat in that chair from about midday, and intended to play, stuck in the same position, right through the night until the sun came up.
Don't make this the only world you live inI don't know what time it was when he woke me up. It must have been something like six in the morning. He looked scared. Genuinely scared. He told me his foot had swollen to about double its normal size, and he couldn't feel anything in his leg. He was lying on his back in bed, just, still. I saw his foot, and it looked like a football pumped up so much it was about to burst.
I told him it might be something like when people get problems with their legs on long haul flights, because they've stayed in the same position, cramped up, for so long. I told him to try to crunch his toes, and that if it didn't calm down we should go to A&E. Thankfully it did. But it was touch and go for a while there. He didn't learn his lesson. After a few hours sleep, he was back in his chair and back on the game.
So here's my Monday Morning Rant: I'm not saying don't have any fun. Far from it. All I'm saying is make sure you unplug every once in a while. At the end of the day, games are just games, like films are just films, and music is just music. Some things are more important.
