Sometimes, stories about video game addiction are alarmist malarkey to bump up ratings. Other times, they’re just flat-out tragic: The Next Web reports that a couple in South Korea has been arrested for allegedly allowing their prematurely born baby to starve to death while they were busy tending to a virtual kid at an Internet café.
The couple reportedly fed their baby only once a day between 12-hour stretches of play-time with a popular role-playing game called Prius Online, in which they were busy raising a virtual kid. The autopsy report of their baby showed the death was a result of a long period of malnutrition.
“The couple seemed to have lost their will to live a normal life, because they didn’t have jobs and gave birth to a premature baby,” said South Korean police officer Chung Jin-won. “They indulged themselves in the online game of raising a virtual character so as to escape from reality, which led to the death of their real baby.”