Readers,

Well, you knew it was going to happen, and a lil’ while back it did: In Seoul, South Korea, a “man died of exhaustion in an Internet cafe after playing computer games non-stop for 49 hours”, according to an AP article carried by FOXNews. He “collapsed Friday after having eaten minimally and not sleeping, refusing to leave his keyboard while he played the battle simulation game Starcraft.”

This is probably a good time to once again bring up the question of how video games are impacting our society.

But I’m not going to, because the truth is: Whatever video games are doing to our society right now ? Friend, it ain’t nowhere near as freaky as what they’ve been doing to Korean society for years now.

Perhaps the best way for me to explain it is like this: Here in America, we get excited about the Super Bowl, the World Series, the Stanley Cup, and the Olympics, right? Over there, they get excited about-… the World Cyber Games.

Justin Hall explains this competition in his article “A Life in Games”: “[I]n Korea, the winner of the ‘World Cyber Games,’ the Olympics of video gaming… not only wins tens of thousands of dollars, he wins respect and admiration. And none are more popular than the winners of Starcraft… It’s fairly popular in the US and Europe, but in South Korea, it is the equivalent of soccer in South America, or baseball in 20th century United States – every young man has played it, and most everyone else knows the rules. Most of the time you turn on television in Korea, there is at least one channel broadcasting famous Starcraft matches, or matches from games like Starcraft.”

You can even see a picture of a professional video game player’s business card here. And I guess you have to hand it to Im Yo Hwan: how many other people get to walk around and legitimately pull out a card that says you’re an “Emperor of the Terran Empire”?

OK, so I’m laughing pretty hard at this nonsense too. But after you’re done slapping your forehead, help me out here: am I the only one starting to get really, really spooked by this?

I have a roommate here at college who, as far as I can tell, does not interact with anyone. He attends his classes, does his homework, and spends the rest of the time in our room, either watching movies or-you guessed it-playing games on the computer. Every once in a while, he’ll read a Terry Brooks novel (“swords and sorcery”-type stuff). That’s it. Literally. He’s never even eaten in the school cafeteria.

I have another very good friend who once dropped out of contact with me completely, so that eventually I called his sister just to make sure he was alive. He was, but he had practically ceased to interact with anyone outside of his workplace for an entire year, preferring instead to play an online roleplaying game called “Dark Ages of Camelot”.

Suzanne Fields reports that “a British study found that 8-year-olds reported knowing all the images in the Pokemon video game, but couldn’t identify otters, beetles or oak trees.”

And finally, according to the AP article, the man who died playing Starcraft in South Korea was fired from his own workplace a couple of days prior to his death. For what? Bet you can guess: missing work to play video games, and playing them at work.

I’m not the only one to notice this new trend, of course. Over at the Conservative Townhall.com, articles condemning our childrens’ transition “from the sandbox to the XBox” have lately been appearing with regularity. Everyone’s finally starting to ask: What do we make of this?

And y’know, I guess this is gonna sound extremely anticlimactic, but I think the answer is: Not much.

Yes, video games are becoming more immersive experiences, and that makes them easier to lose one’s self within them. But those who don’t worship the Master of the Universe will always search for a diversion with which to fill the void left without Him. If it’s not video games, the unsaved depend on drugs, or sex, or work, etc.

What we have here is yet another disease in desperate need of the exact same vaccine: Our Lord Jesus.

As for the game of Starcraft in particular, I imagine the boys over at Blizzard Entertainment must be patting themselves on the back pretty hard for still being able to kill a 49-yr. old man with the thing. After all, the game was released all the way back in ‘98, and Game Revolution PC only gave it a “B” then.

Adam