World of Warcraft online funeral held

A female player with the nickname Snowly died last month after playing WoW for several days during a national holiday in preparation for a difficult stretch of the game. Other members of the online community have remembered her as a diligent and dedicated player. She had said to other players that she had begun to feel very tired out before her death.

Players around for the funeral saw a haunting scene, with characters lined up, heads bowed in remembrance of Snowly. The event was only made more morose by the more recent death of another player named Nan Ren Gu Shi, another videogame related death.

This is being used as a platform to springboard the introduction by the Chinese Government of monitoring tools to prevent players from logging more than a certain number of hours on certain online games. Certainly, imposed limits would prevent the recurrence of incidents like these, but players are already speaking out against what they see to be harsh restrictions on play.

It is interesting to note that during the past several months most, if not all, cases of videogame related death have occurred within Asia- China, South Korea and Japan, rather than Europe and North America. This highlights the difference in videogames culture between East and West. µ