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A Matter of Life and Death

Video games have always been about life and death, digitally speaking. When I was growing up, losing your digital life was pretty straightforward: fail to dodge Donkey Kong’s barrel, and Mario bites it.

Game over.

We still have video games, of course, and digital realms where characters can meet their virtual demise. Nowadays, however, things are a lot more realistic. Fantasy role-playing games render death a lot more realistically—and at times graphically—than anything I encountered back when video games were two-minute, 2-D distractions you paid a quarter for.

For some people, however, video games have become a matter of life and death not only in the pixilated sense, but in the real world as well.

Last week brought news of a couple in South Korea who were so enamored with a virtual world called Prius Online (a screen shot of which is shown here) that they would “play” 12 hours a day—much of that time spent raising a digital baby. The problem? They also had a real baby, one that they neglected, and one that eventually died of malnutrition and dehydration.

The story, tragic and unbelievable as it is, got a lot of press. But one assessment helped me see that this story isn’t just about a freak tragedy on the other side of the world. William Saletan, who writes for slate.com, had this to say in his article “Game Over“:

We used to call sites like this one games. But today, they're more than that. They're worlds. … A game is a place where your mind takes a vacation. A world is a place where your mind moves in, sets up house, and changes its mailing address. That's what happened to the Korean couple. They left their real daughter at home, alone, while they spent their days at an Internet café. Or rather, they spent their days in cyberspace. The café was more like a Harry Potter portkey, a vehicle for disappearing from one place and appearing in another. Once a day, they returned to the physical world to feed their daughter powdered milk. Then they went back to the world they cared about. One day, after a 12-hour stint online, they visited the physical world and found their baby dead.

But Saletan doesn’t leave things there. Instead, he connects the dots between what seems like a dispatch from bizarro world and the world that I live in too.

Maybe this is just a weird story about a sick couple on the other side of the planet. But look in the mirror. Every time you answer your cell phone in traffic, squander your work day on YouTube, text a colleague during dinner, or turn on the TV to escape your kids, you're leaving this world. You're neglecting the people around you, sometimes at the risk of killing them. The problem isn't that you're a bad or weak person. It's worse than that. The problem is that all of us are susceptible to being drawn into other worlds, and other worlds are becoming ever more compelling.

I may not leave my children alone for 12 hours at a time, but I have been known to ignore a plea for milk or a cracker once or twice because I was absorbed in something online. And in that sense, Saletan’s observations here offer a call to wake up and rediscover that the real world will always be more real—and more important—than any of the digital pursuits that tempt us to escape into them from time to time.

Game over, indeed.