Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline Read Online Free Page B

weakened heart, lending credence to Dr. Eliot’s claims.
    If Rong-Yu’s death was, as Miss Huang believes, a failing of self-discipline or some other nonbiological defect, then it’s important to establish that his heart attack wasn’t due to a pre-existing medical condition.
    Dr. Ta-Chen Su is the attending physician and clinical associate professor at the Department of Internal Medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital. The number of cases of young men dying while playing games is too few to have inspired any specific research into the phenomenon. But Su has a personal interest in the subject: Rong-Yu was his patient.
    The NTUH is housed in a grand redbrick building, fronted by pairs of Doric columns that bite into the pavement by the side of a Taipei main road. Outside, the oily scent of traffic hangs in the air, while the interior is all disinfectant and white fluorescent lighting.
    ‘It wasn’t reported, but last year Chen had a heart attack and was transferred to the hospital for evaluation,’ Dr. Su tells me. ‘During his hospitalisation the checks included echocardiography, twenty-four-hour electrocardiography, cardiac catheterization, coronary angiography, and cardiac electrophysiology.’
    But the test results showed no signs that Rong-Yu had a heart problem that might lead to sudden death. The young man’s unexpected heart attack was something of a mystery. Rong-Yu refused the doctor’s recommendation to have a cardioverter-defibrillator fitted. Moreover, when he discovered that there was nothing wrong with his heart, he declined to have any more cardiovascular tracking, which might have explained the attack. Three months later, Rong-Yu was dead.
    ‘As we can eliminate any pre-existing heart problems from his cause of death, he must have died from another cause,’ says Su.
    Dr. Su believes that there are multiple possible causes of death for Rong-Yu, as for the other people who have died while playing video games in Internet cafés.
    ‘Acute autonomic dysfunction is the first potential cause of death,’ he says. ‘Video games can generate a great deal of tension in the human body. The player’s blood pressure and heart rate rise. If this excessive tension is maintained for more than ten hours, it can result in cardiac arrhythmia and sympathetic-parasympathetic imbalance, also called acute autonomic dysfunction.’
    Video games deal in tension and peril. This is true of most fiction, in which conflict is necessary to create drama, but in mostvideo games the player is the subject of the stress and conflict. The conflict is necessary for the sense of triumph, release and learning that comes when it’s overcome. But Dr. Su warns that this cycle of stress and release, when prolonged, can have physiological effects.
    ‘Even if the game is not especially stressful in this way, simply playing for such a long period of time can prove fatal,’ he adds.
    Dr. Su compares playing games for days at a time to putting in unhealthy amounts of overtime at work—something that leads to exhaustion of the mind and body.
    In Japan, enough people have died at their desks while working overtime that the Japanese invented the term karōshi , or death by overwork. In 1987, the Japanese Ministry of Labour even began to publish statistics on karōshi . The International Labour Organization (ILO), a United Nations agency that deals with labour issues, has published an article on the phenomenon, warning that all-night, late-night, or holiday work for long and excessive hours can lead to a worker’s death. If death at the work-station is a frequent and well-documented occurrence, then death at the PlayStation appears to be the flipside of the same coin.
    The third potential cause of Rong-Yu’s death, according to Dr. Su, is what doctors refer to as ‘Economy Class Syndrome.’
    ‘Many studies show that maintaining the same pose for hours at a time without moving your body, especially your legs, can cause deep vein