This seems like a really bad rule of thumb. People have died playing soccer and football with full pads. People have died running. On some rare occasions there have even been deaths due to chess games. All activities have risk.
Seriously, you must clarify and improve your argument, because right now you seem to me to have written your bottom line (“chess good, World of Warcraft bad”), and just taking whatever zig-zaggy way you can find to reach it.
The same argument can be made for people who have died playing WoW. Some of them are people who likely have psychologies particularly vulnerable to addiction. Similarly, there have been cases where parents have let their kids die while they were immersed in video games. I suspect that those people would in similar circumstances with other potential issues be likely to find other ways of fatally neglecting their children.
The upshot is that “people die from it” is not sufficient. This is especially true as the human population gets larger. With nearly seven billion people, the number of people who are going to die in freak results from essentially harmless activity is going to be high. One needs therefore to pay attention to things like the proportion or look if the activity has any positive or negative effects on the vast majority of people who engage in it and don’t die.
This seems like a really bad rule of thumb. People have died playing soccer and football with full pads. People have died running. On some rare occasions there have even been deaths due to chess games. All activities have risk.
The chess game may have been the proximal cause, but I doubt it was the distal cause.
Seriously, you must clarify and improve your argument, because right now you seem to me to have written your bottom line (“chess good, World of Warcraft bad”), and just taking whatever zig-zaggy way you can find to reach it.
The same argument can be made for people who have died playing WoW. Some of them are people who likely have psychologies particularly vulnerable to addiction. Similarly, there have been cases where parents have let their kids die while they were immersed in video games. I suspect that those people would in similar circumstances with other potential issues be likely to find other ways of fatally neglecting their children.
The upshot is that “people die from it” is not sufficient. This is especially true as the human population gets larger. With nearly seven billion people, the number of people who are going to die in freak results from essentially harmless activity is going to be high. One needs therefore to pay attention to things like the proportion or look if the activity has any positive or negative effects on the vast majority of people who engage in it and don’t die.