She must had been sick, when discovered she was apparently holding them while changing the sheets or something hoping they would wake up after they had been dead for two weeks or two days. I think the report might have indicated that she also had been trying to look after them while they were deceased.

What is also tragic is that when I got online to post this, I received an email invitation to join Gaia Online on behalf of a female friend, "where you can create an avatar, play games, watch movies and hang out with millions of members-all for free!".

It is ridiculous, I have been around gaming since the 1970's, and we could only dream of the time that games like half-life, and things like Facebook, would be there for people to communicate and socialize on-line, and be the mass market successes they eventually were that would push computers into many homes, and 3D action gaming, like we now enjoy with FPS games, that even I will play once in a while, even for up to 12 hours sometimes. But we are creating a society of disjointed people having problems learning to socialize, and socially problemed people that neither people in the game are there to check on and are too far detached from people in the real world to keep an adequate eye on. Not only that, the sick can get sicker, and people can get sick and die. I have always thought that this overuse was not good, and while it is useful to have contact with other people around the planet for practical reasons, or existing relationship/interests reasons, time consuming co/dependent relationships with remote people is perhaps very useless, and such time consuming relationships that are so intense and vital to your self being that you feel threatened if anything happens to them, is potentially hazardous. We should be forming social relationships with people we know, people we can meet, and people that are local, so we can get together and meet them instead of overwhelming ourselves with artificial life so that there is no room for the real world or the practical..

We might say it only affects a few people, but the truth is that it probably affects many more people that don't realize it, and it only takes a few people/small percentage to be more seriously susceptible to produce truly tragic results and slip through the statistics on links between certain gaming behaviors and their impact.

I think the Half Life thing is a red herring here. This woman was clearly deranged, which is a shame in itself. But if she had not been playing a game (maybe Half Life) she would have been sitting in a corner rocking, or staring out of the window. The link between a mother and her children is meant to be (and all evidence suggests it is IS) extremely powerful. For a mother not to spot that her children had died indicates there was something VERY wrong with her... that something was not caused by video games.


No arguments there. Socialising is an important part of human life, and helps people become "well adjusted". Anything that reduces socialisation will, eventually, be to the detriment of society, and eventually lead to the dehumanisation of sections of society.

Heavy stuff... but no one is forcing kids to be this way. THey are being given choices, and are taking them without coercion.

My apologies, I made a mistake, it was second life, I have reported the post, and hopefully somebody can change the "half-lifes" to "second-life". It was hours after my very early bed time when I posted this and I was very tired..

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/02/2730808.htm



Yes, but it would not have been too obvious to people something was wrong to people that saw her wandering around in second life. At least if she wondered out on the street or had a wider circle of friends, people might be alerted.



That is the problem they are kids, sick people, and vulnerable people being given damaging choices. It is not that we should not have the choice at all, but we need systems to catch and protect people. For instance, the amount of time somebody plays online is an indication that something maybe up, maybe it should be limited, maybe people should be warned as happens with cigarette packets, maybe they should be support systems there to help, or check up if something looks rather wrong.(for instance, a deranged person will act bizarrely in a game, their movements will be erratic or slothful, clumsy, that can be picked up by a computer program) and a few other items. Deaths like this will probably still happen outside, but at least less might happen in the games.

The other bazaar tragic thing that happened, was that as I was typing the post a friend rang me up about something, and told me he knew a local woman in another case a few weeks ago, where she cut up her newborn baby being apparently deranged and believing the baby had drowned or something. It's bazaar, hate these things happening..