The sometimes fatal attraction of video games

As an avid video-game player from his college years, Simon Parkin, author of a new book about gaming culture, was intrigued to discover that they were being blamed for a string of deaths in Asian internet cafes, and that one government had even legislated against them. Can the peculiar form of obsession they inspire in people sometimes prove fatal?
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Chen Rong-yu died in two places at once. At 10pm on Tuesday, 31 January 2012, the 23-year-old took a seat in a corner of an internet cafe on the outskirts of New Taipei City, Taiwan. He lit a cigarette and logged on to an online video game. He played almost continuously for 23 hours, stopping occasionally only to rest his head on the table in front of his monitor and sleep for a little while. Each time that he woke he picked up his game where he had left off. Then, one time, he did not raise his head. It was nine hours before a member of the cafe's staff tried to rouse the motionless man, in order to tell him that his time was up, only to find his body stiff and cold.

Chen died there in the Taiwanese cafe, with its peeling paint and cloying heat. And he died in Summoner's Rift, a forest blanketed by perpetual gloom. Summoner's Rift has the appearance of a remote, unvisited place, but each day it is frequented by hundreds of thousands of people, players of the online video game League of Legends, arguably the most popular online video game in the world. Summoner's Rift is the pitch on which they do battle.

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