Mauricio Arango (FGCU) : World of Warcraft suicide

25. February 2009 by student.

I recently started getting interested in that popular PC game World of Warcraft. So one day I search it on Google because I was bored and had nothing better to do and one of the first results was about suicide having to do with WoW. Curiousity got the best of me and I clicked it. The story was about a boy in China who was 13 years old and commited suicide by jumping off a 24 story building. The reason…..World of Warcraft.  According to the Hollywood reporter the boy jumped off the building after playing the game for 36 hours straight, he left a note saying that the reason for his suicide was so that he could join “to join the heroes of the game he worshipped.” The parents were so devestated, that they felt the need to sue Blizzard because over in China the box for the game doesn’t include the little sticker that says for children over 13 like it does here in the USA. So according to the parent’s lawyers, if the box contained a little sticker that said 14+ the boy would still be alive. But I think there are two sides to this arguement.

     I think that maybe if the parents were to pay a little bit more attention to the boy instead of letting him play a game for 36 hours straight, maybe he wouldn’t have felt the need to leap of the building.

     But theres also the child himself to think of. What if that game was his only way of escaping reality’s dark sides. Maybe he had no friends and he was picked on at school. What better place to go than to the magical lands in WoW, where anything he anted he could get, where he had friends everywhere and he probably had alot of power in that game. So he could do his own share of picking on “noobs”I personally don’t think the parents should win this lawsuit, if anything they should have a lesson on telling their kids when enough is enough. Maybe if they had told the boy to go outside and play, or maybe take a couple hours breal he would’nt have felt the need to ”join his heroes” all I know is that I started playing the game again and I can honestly say I don’t feel the need to jump. 

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