Diablo III Gamer Dies After Playing Non-Stop For 40 Hours
A teenager in Taiwan reportedly was found dead after a marathon session playing Diablo III, the hugely popular RPG video game.
The 18-year-old stayed at the controls for what amounts to a full work week, according to The Australian:
[The gamer] booked a private room at the cafe in Tainan, southern Taiwan, around noon on July 13 and played for nearly two days without eating…
On the morning of July 15, an attendant entered the room and found [him] resting on a table. After the attendant woke him, he stood, took a few steps and then collapsed, the report said. He was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at a local hospital.
The cause of death is under investigation by police, and authorities will be conducting an autopsy.
In early February, another gamer in Taiwan expired while playing League of Legends an an Internet cafe. Hours passed before his fellow gamers noticed something was wrong. At the time, cardiac arrest was suspected.
Cardiovascular issues such as blood clots are also a possibility in this latest case because of “long hours in a sedentary position.”
Yahoo!Games explains that “Deaths in Internet cafes are rare, but happen from time to time when players concentrate so intensely on their games, that they ignore factors like the body’s need for sleep and food.”
Published by Blizzard Entertainment, Diablo III is, to date, the most pre-ordered PC game of all time on Amazon and set a record as the fastest-selling PC game in the first day of its release (3.5 million copies) in May 2012.
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