One of the features that I use most on my blackberry is the RSS Feed application. On this application I get all of the news from the Daily Mail website, as well as other blogs and sites I follow. Now usually I get sent a lot of political related articles, or celebrity type story's, which I tend to skim over, however there was one story the other day that stood out, and I just had to read it.
The article was about a 42 year old man, and a 13 year old boy, who had been playing online all day, against each other, on the xbox game 'Call Of Duty: Black Ops'. Now the story really begins when later on in the day, the young boy kills the man, in the game, the man flips out, storms around to where the young boy was and began to throttle him, half to death.
At this point, here's some quick background information to help fill in the blanks: The man was a friend of the young boys family, and so lived nearby, and already knew the boy, and also the young boy along with a friend had been playing all day with the man, throughout which they'd been talking to and goading him over the online chat.
I don't really know what to say about this story. I've played this game lots of times, and I know that it is very easy to find yourself getting dawn in and wrapped up in the atmosphere of it, but never to the point that I'd go up to someone in real life and try kill them. It does say in the article that the man later on said that it was a 'moment of madness', and has since seen the boy and apologised, but why did it ever get that far?
A few very easy to implement solutions to this problem would have been:
1) Remember that its just a game, calm down.
2) Remember they're just kids.
3) Turn the Xbox off, nothing can happen if it's off.
Why didn't he just do one of these instead of resorting to suffocating the kid.
In my opinion, it was just stupid, its only a game, if you don't want them killing you on it, get better at it. I will admit that I can't help but find this slightly funny, but that's just me. In no way is it the game makers fault, which ever way you look at it, it was down to the boy and the man. This does bring up the fact though that in the article it does say that the child was 13, when actually there's a game rating of 18, so technically its his own fault because he shouldn't have been playing it.
Both parties are now fine, no long lasting damage done, the man got his punishment for hurting the boy, and the boys back to his normal life. It does just leave you with that one last burning question, Why? Think next time.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device
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