Aushang: Verfasst von wtanaka (648) am Sa, 2005-11-19 15:14. | Betreff: 13yo jumps to his death. Parents sue video game company.

Is it just that I find Chinese news more interesting, so I look at more Chinese news than other news?  Or is that that there's a strange number of strange incidents?  Tonight one of my fellow diners related the story of a man and a woman whose only child had drowned in an accident.  The wife had undergone tubal occlusion, so they discussed and decided that the husband would find another woman and have a child with her, so that the family line could go on. The child was born. The wife paid the (younger) woman 100,000 RMB, and everything was happy... Until the younger woman had another child, and it became evident that the man had fallen for her. Well at some point, the story ended with the wife killing the younger woman by strangling her and slitting her throat with a razor.

But back to this story.  From this here story, we find that:

a 13 year old Tianjin boy who jumped to his death from a 24 story building last year, allegedly because he had been playing World of Warcraft too much.

The parents are now suing Blizzard Entertainment, the company that made the computer game "World of Warcraft."  I'm glad that I don't have a computer capable of playing that game, or I'd certainly have wasted a few weeks or months of my life.  The lawsuit angle sounds like a bit of an money-grubbing-lawyer  story, straight out of a John Grisham novel.  But I'm still not used to seeing such sensational news.  I hope I don't get used to it.  But then again, this is China.

By the way, I blame Confucius for the first story.  Why decide to go through such a silly procedure to have another child (or two) when you could adopt one and make the world a better place?  Blood lines... or something.  Seems like a Confucian thing to do.