Man Dies in Taiwan Internet Cafe after Three-Day Gaming Binge
China's first gaming-related death since rescinding its nationwide ban on video game consoles occurred at an Internet cafe with no PlayStation or Xbox in sight.
CNN reports that a 32-year-old male was announced dead at an Internet cafe in Kaohsiung, Taiwan after binge-playing PC games for three days straight. An employee found the player lifeless, laying his upper torso across his keyboard at 10:00 AM Jan. 8. The player checked into the cafe early morning on Jan. 6. After being rushed to the hospital, health officials declared him dead on arrival, determining cardiac failure as his cause of death.
"He has been unemployed for a long time, and internet cafes were the only place he could go to," said Jennifer Wu, a spokesperson the Hunei district's police department. "His family said he would disappear for two to three days on end."
Footage on a closed-circuit camera showed him collapse after a brief seizure-like struggle. Officials believe he must have been dead for several hours before they arrived on the scene, based on the person's status of rigor mortis. Reports indicate that nearly all of the gamers in the cafe continued playing their PC games as if nothing was happening the entire time the paramedics and police were on the seen. The cafe's staff member on duty said that many of its regular customers often play for consecutive days, with many of them sleeping at their chairs.
In October 2013, a McDonald's and its adjacent shopping mall in China were severely damaged due to an electrical fire which the mall's security ignored while playing mobile games all night, deactivating the in-house alarm system just to continue gaming. One year prior, the corpse of a man who died playing online games in an Internet cafe was unnoticed for half a day by its staff and patrons.