Chinese Guy Plays MMORPG, Frags Self IRL
I keep hearing about these stories where someone stays in an internet cafe in China for so long that they “game themselves to death.” It has been reported so often now by the Communist Media in China that it should be its own meme.
From Reuters here:
A Chinese man dropped dead after playing Internet games for three consecutive days, state media said on Monday as China seeks to wean Internet addicts offline.
The man from the southern boomtown of Guangzhou, aged about 30, died on Saturday after being rushed to the hospital from the Internet cafe..
“Police have ruled out the possibility of suicide,” the newspaper said, adding that exhaustion was the most likely cause of death. It did not say what game he was playing.
China, worried about the spread of pornography and politically incorrect content, has banned the opening of new cybercafes this year and issued orders limiting the time Internet users can spend playing online.
I looked at the picture of the Internet Cafe in China and several questions popped into my mind.
- Are the Chinese not allowed to have broadband connectivity at home?
- Many of those monitors show MMORPG games. Does the cafe actually buy licenses for each of the games?
- Do crowded cafes like this have a strict ‘move your feet, lose your seat’ policy, making people stay for days?
If my experience in Latin America is any indication, no, they do not. The folks that install all the computers just clone a master drive with tons of pirated games installed.
Thanks for the comment Doug- that’s what I was kinda thinking too.
From my experiences from a few years back doing cyber security, nations like South Korea had gajillions of pirated copies of win95. And Microsoft quit updating those computers with Windows update. So what happened was these PC’s became huge botnets and hackers would play king of the hill installing malware on them.