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Couple Let Their Baby Starve To Death While Nurturing A Virtual Child
This is a very sad story. A South Korean couple have been arrested for starving their baby to death. The couple allegedly neglected their three-month-old daughter, who was born premature.
Once a day, between 12-hour stretches at a neighborhood Internet cafe, they fed their baby. Instead of nurturing their own daughter, they became obsessed with raising a virtual child in the popular role-playing game called Prius Online. The couple were arrested in Suwon, a suburb of Seoul, 5 months after reporting the death of their baby. The baby’s autopsy showed that she’d died due to a long period of malnutrition.
Chung Jin-won, a police officer, said, “The couple seemed to have lost their will to live a normal life, because they didn’t have jobs and gave birth to a premature baby. They indulged themselves in the online game of raising a virtual character so as to escape from reality, which led to the death of their real baby.”
Kwak Dae-kyung, a professor at Seoul’s Dongguk University, told the Yonhap news agency that the couple lost track of reality.
“Online game addiction can blur the line between reality and the virtual world. It seems that taking care of their on-line game character erased any sense of guilt they may have had for neglecting their daughter.”
The professor went on to urge the government to create measures to encourage families and neighbors to contact local authorities or hospitals if people close to them show symptoms of online addiction.
This is the dirty underbelly of South Korea’s fast and cheap Internet connections. Over the last ten years, there have been many stories of Internet addiction and compulsive gaming leading to serious consequences and even death. In 2007, South Korea established an Internet addiction camp to help people overcome their addiction to the Internet.
For more insight, here is a link to a video from a PBS’ documentary on FRONTLINE’s Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier – One Game Too Many (video).
Source: Gizmodo – Busy Raising Virtual – Busy Raising Virtual Baby, Couple Lets Their Real Baby Starve
Discussion - 17 Comments/Pingbacks RSS feed for comments on this post
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This is sad. They did give up. When their baby was born that just pushed them over the edge. My daughter has game systems and I have her on a time limit. But I think we need an Internet addiction camp here in the USA. Because this is the home of Internet addicts.
There is nothing to comment here really, I hope its a dirty advertising trick from the Prius Online team and not a real event.
Nah man. I'm sure this is real. This isn't even the first time I've heard of this type of thing happening. I think the last case I read about was in the US.
This is sad in more ways that one. The baby is dead and Prius Online catches the blame. People need to take responsibility for their actions and realize that games online are just that… games. Reality always has to take priority. I can say this with conviction as a prior player of UO, DAoC, FFXI, and WoW. Now I have other priorities so I dropped the online gaming. A new set of 'leet' tier XXXX armor isn't going to pay the bills or land a better job, and investing in a fake baby will never pay off the way investing in a real baby will.
Oh my goodness, that poor baby. This is so sad.
wow
Tragic.
“Once a day, between 12-hour stretches at a neighborhood Internet cafe, they fed their baby” – good grief, that is just pathetic. Makes you wonder how it is that we require driver's licences and other credentials but people are allowed to have children without any proof whatsoever that they have mastered certain basic life skills (not to mention common sense). Are we to assume that all the information required to navigate through life can be simply found through Google? Even if this were true, how can we be certain that people know how to find it through online search?
Ah, the vices of cheap Internet. Never looked at it from this angle. It's sad really.
Wow, that's crazy. Totally crazy. Poor child
.
These people disgust me… sick bastards