There are essentially two ways of dying whilst playing games. The first is through pure exhaustion and fatigue. There are numerous cases where die-hard gamers end up really dying… hard. In 2005 a South Korean man collapsed after ­playing Starcraft for almost 50 hours, barely eating or sleeping. ­Eventually he succumbed to exhaustion and died. In another incident a Chinese man died after playing games all ­throughout his seven day holiday. Apparently in both incidents the deceased got so engrossed in the gaming that they forgot about the “living” part.

The other way of dying whilst gaming is by meeting fellow gamers who take things a bit too seriously; as Zhu Caoyuan, a man from Beijing, found out when his friend Qiu Chengwei stabbed him to death after he had sold the “dragon sabre” in a game of Legend of Mir 3. They apparently won it together, but the thieving Zhu tried to pull a fast one, but had one pulled on him.

You lie in bed awake at night, you are restless and worried, as for weeks now, you have this terribly strange twitching in muscles all over your body. Then you decide to Google:
“muscle twitching” and you determine that you must have “Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease”, an incurable and fatal brain disease, a symptom of which is twitching muscles.

More and more people are self-diagnosing in this way, causing seriously unnecessary concern. The opposite of this effect, and possibly more dangerous, is when people diagnose themselves with harmless conditions, not bothering to go see a doctor. A word of warning: Don’t do this.

There is a certain group of people out there often referred to as “trolls”. They like to spend their free time making people’s lives miserable by “trolling” their websites, usually just for the “lulz”. This happened to the Epilepsy Foundation’s website (www.epilepsyfoundation.org) in 2008. A group of trolls hacked the site and posted numerous flashing images in the support forums that caused massive headaches and near seizures in some photosensitive epilepsy sufferers.

For an example of the type of thing the trolls did on the epilepsy site, have a gander at this: encyclopediadramatica.com/Epilepsy (unless you have photosensitive epilepsy).

No article on the dangers of the Internet would be complete without a word or two about Internet chat rooms. They’ve been around since the Internet was conceived. They may provide hours of pleasant conversation about whatever suits your fancy. But, it’s what suits Mr. Creep’s fancy that you should be worried about. It might sound obvious, but if you are going to meet someone that you met online, take someone that you know in real life with you. Failing this, meet your cyber acquaintance where other people can hear you scream. And if the person you’re meeting doesn’t look like the picture on their profile, run.