[ExI] Bodies

[Damien Broderick]

On 3/9/2010 1:09 PM, Keith Henson wrote:

> I suspect that virtually all humans will abandon physical reality entirely.
>
> You can see this starting with Second Life and WoW.

Like:

South Korean police have arrested a couple for starving their 
three-month-old daughter to death while they devoted hours to playing a 
computer game that involved raising a virtual character of a young girl.

The 41-year-old man and 25-year-old woman, who met through a chat 
website, reportedly left their infant unattended while they went to 
internet cafes. They only occasionally dropped by to feed her powdered milk.

"I am sorry for what I did and hope that my daughter does not suffer any 
more in heaven," the husband is quoted as saying on the asiaone website.

According to the Yonhap news agency, South Korean police said the couple 
had become obsessed with raising a virtual girl called Anima in the 
popular role-playing game Prius Online. The game, similar to Second 
Life, allows players to create another existence for themselves in a 
virtual world, including getting a job, interacting with other users and 
earning an extra avatar to nurture once they reach a certain level.

"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," Chung 
Jin-Won, a police officer, told Yonhap. "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."

Last September after a 12-hour gaming-session the couple came home in 
the morning to find their daughter dead. The baby's malnourished body 
aroused police suspicions of neglect that were was confirmed after an 
autopsy.

The couple fled to the wife's parents' house in Yangju, Gyeonggi 
province, but were picked up on Monday. The case has shocked South Korea 
and once again highlighted obsessive behaviour related to the internet.

A 22-year-old Korean man was charged last month with murdering his 
mother because she nagged him for spending too much time playing games. 
After killing her the man went to a nearby internet cafe and continued 
with his game, said officials. In 2005 a young man collapsed in an 
internet cafe in the city of Taegu after playing the game StarCraft 
almost continuously for 50 hours. He went into cardiac arrest and died 
at a local hospital.

Lee Joung-sun, an MP from the ruling Grand National party, last month 
submitted a bill restricting the hours offered to online gamers. Several 
bills are pending in the national assembly suggesting restrictions on 
teenagers' use of internet cafes and games.

Research published last month in the UK showed evidence of a link 
between excessive internet use and depression. Leeds University 
researchers, writing in the Psychopathology journal, said a small 
proportion of internet users were classed as internet addicts and that 
people in this group were more likely to be depressed than non-addicted 
users.