Posted on 03/04/2010 3:09:36 PM PST by myknowledge
A Korean couple let their baby starve to death while they were busy raising a virtual child online, police said.
The couple, from Suwon in South Korea, would leave their three-month-old daughter home alone in their apartment while they spent up to 12 hours a day playing a Second-Life style3D fantasy game called Prius Online, The Sun newspaper reports.
Police said the couple had become totally immersed in the online game and neglected their real lives, giving their daughter just a bottle of milk per day.
Father Kim Yoo-chul, 41, and 25-year-old mother Choi Mi-sun called paramedics when they arrived home from a stint in a net cafe to find their daughter dead In September last year.
The couple first told police they had found their daughter dead when they woke in the morning, but suspicions were raised by the malnourished state the baby was found in.
"She appears to have starved to death because she was not fed for such a long period of time," a spokesman for Korea's national crime laboratory said after an autopsy was carried out.
The couple fled after the baby's funeral, but police tracked them down and charged them with child abuse and neglect on Tuesday.
The parents told police they had not been to a net cafe in their five months on the run due to their "sense of guilt".
South Korea, one of the most wired countries in the world, has a high rate of internet game participation among its population.
No wonder online fantasy game junkies can be bad parents, letting their daughter starve to death.
This is just evil. Pure evil.
When i first read this , I though it said "one of the most WEIRD countries in the world.
No, but at least two of their citizens are.
Just shoot them.
Then I guess we need warning labels on games.
Lock ‘em up. What that child had to go through was horrendous.
Online games are to Asians what blogging is to Americans.
Read a similar story about a [Kos] blogger.
The authorities found her house covered with feces and filth. Two naked and unfed children with various pets.
All she did 24hrs a day was sit by her keyboard and wait for that next post.
Don't blame the game, blame the player.
just damn. ping
Law & Order SVU episode in 3... 2...
sad ping.
I was trying to be sarcastic
Well, I guess that can be said for all Countries on the planet.
:-)
I didn’t know North Korea had welfare. Twelve hours a day playing a game without a job ?
I Freeped so much one time that my african violet died.
No, but it would help to put one on children.
Caution: This requires constant attention and loving care.
lol. true.
Only, they will make the neglectful parents Tea Party activists...
You are so right. I didn’t read it well enough. I guess I just take for granted the bad stuff happens in the north.
They lost their real daughter because they were too busy playing with a virtual doll.Diana West was right, we are becoming a world of children
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality
“Hyperreality is used in semiotics and postmodern philosophy to describe a hypothetical inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy, especially in technologically advanced postmodern cultures . . .
Baudrillard in particular suggests that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more.”
Hyperreality: a hypothetical no longer.
“Just shoot them.”
Way too lenient. Let the punishment fit the crime. Lock them up and give them nothing but a baby bottle full of milk each day (or whenever the guards remember) to share and let them waste away slowly and painfully, until they die from starvation, the way their baby did.
Plant killer!
Several years ago, an Asian man (either Korean or Japanese) died after a marathon gaming session. He played “non-stop” for about a week.
There was a Japanese man who stabbed a friend to death because he loaned the friend a “magic knife” to kill a monster in an online game. The friend sold the knife to another player for a sizable amount of real world money.
Crazy world...
There’s an extra layer to this because it’s in South Korea. There, they do most of their online gaming through internet cafes instead of via broadband at home like most other places in the world. So they actually had to leave the baby at home alone while they left the house.
}:-)4
Bingo.
Dude.
NANAPL.
I know you say “laugh or cry,” but that’s just the thing: There’s no laugh here. Especially after feeding my 1 year old daughter some pancakes.
Don’t blame yourself, Slim. Those stinkin’ things will die just to spite you.
My sentiments exactly. Heck, I have throes of guilt whenever I miss my Rocket’s 10 a.m. feeding (we’re trying to fatten him up again since the last allergy attack before we corrected his food literally took a lot out of him).
Tomagachi, gigapet, and now Gigababy?
I agree that there’s no laugh here. This is raw outrage, which I ping once in a great while. I promise to go back to being a smartass post-haste.
G-d bless you and your daughter.
Best of luck to Rocket for a quick recovery and roly-poly kittybelly.
Amateurs.
I tanked Nefarian while changing a diaper.
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