Computer Games Worse than Kim Jong-il

Sensible South Koreans are praying for the inevitable war with their communist neighbors to the north to come quickly. Their only hope is for Kim Jong-il's missiles to rain down on them and blow up the computers that are destroying their country from within.

In just the past few years there have been the following computer game caused deaths in the land of kimchi and delicious barbecue:

• A 15 year-old boy killed himself after being scolded by his mother for spending too much time playing online games.
  
• A man and his wife left their baby daughter to die of malnutrition while they spent all their time raising a "virtual child" on the Internet.
  
• A 32 year-old man died from exhaustion from playing video games non-stop for 5 full days.
  
• A boiler repair man died of a heart attack while in an internet cafe playing "StarCraft" for nearly 50 consecutive hours.
  

And the deaths keep on coming. Once again, we've got a mother killing her baby, but this time not from neglect, but by violence born of rage. A distinct advantage of "virtual pets" over real babies is that you don't have to clean up their urine off the real floor. This mother obviously resented her child's inability to live up to the same standards as her cyber-cat.

A South Korean mother, exhausted after playing online computer games, allegedly strangled her neglected three-year-old son when he urinated on the [apartment] floor.

The 27-year-old, known by her surname as Kim, is believed to have killed her eldest child after trying to relax following a morning tending to virtual pets and cards on the Internet.

[...]

She is thought to have left her baby's corpse in the house for THREE days before her in-laws discovered it and alerted the police.

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‘She said she was so mad at him because she was about to take some rest after playing online games for four hours in the morning,’ a city police spokesman told AFP, describing the woman as addicted to game-playing.

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The South Korean Government estimates that the number of web addicts is about two million in a nation of over 50 million. Some one million addicts are thought to be in their 20s or older.

They have recognised that addicts are no longer only teenagers whose problems can be spotted by parents, but are increasingly young adults whose gaming is unsupervised.

Young mothers are especially vulnerable, as they have to spend long periods of time at home with only their young and online friends for company.

UPDATE: Looks like the next Korean war may well be nigh, and the world has a Christmas tree to thank.

South Korea has lit a massive steel Christmas tree that overlooks the world's most heavily armed border and is within sight of North Korea, prompting threats of attack from the communist state.

[...]

North Korea, officially atheist and with only a handful of sanctioned churches in Pyongyang with services for foreigners, warned that lighting the tree would constitute a "dangerous, rash act" with the potential to trigger a war.

[Daily Mail] [The Telegraph]