Baby Dies as Parents Raise Virtual Child Online
March 5th, 2010Via: NineMSN:
A Korean couple let their baby starve to death while they were busy raising a virtual child online, police said.
The couple, from Suwon in South Korea, would leave their three-month-old daughter home alone in their apartment while they spent up to 12 hours a day playing a Second-Life style3D fantasy game called Prius Online, The Sun newspaper reports.
Police said the couple had become totally immersed in the online game and neglected their real lives, giving their daughter just a bottle of milk per day.
Father Kim Yoo-chul, 41, and 25-year-old mother Choi Mi-sun called paramedics when they arrived home from a stint in a net cafe to find their daughter dead In September last year.
The couple first told police they had found their daughter dead when they woke in the morning, but suspicions were raised by the malnourished state the baby was found in.
“She appears to have starved to death because she was not fed for such a long period of time,” a spokesman for Korea’s national crime laboratory said after an autopsy was carried out.
The couple fled after the baby’s funeral, but police tracked them down and charged them with child abuse and neglect on Tuesday.
The parents told police they had not been to a net cafe in their five months on the run due to their “sense of guilt”.
South Korea, one of the most wired countries in the world, has a high rate of internet game participation among its population.
Research Credit: TR
I think I need to vomit now. 🙁
No no no no no. When I read about things like this, the big kill off doesn’t seem such a bad idea after all. Or a license to have children. But then I stop and remind myself that these things are the price that we pay for having, and exercising, our free will. But still, damn.
I thought farmland was messed up. This is over the top. They watched the baby waste away WHILE pretending to raise a baby. Does that even make sense?
Though shocking and somewhat ironic, this isn’t much different than a situation where parents are drug addicted and allow a child’s death through drug induced neglect.
I point this out, not to mitigate or minimize the wrongdoing of the parents, but to illustrate that technological systems can end up influencing people and their behavior as strongly as pharmacological compounds.
In fact, this is an established field of academic study called “Captology”. Captology is a “body of expertise in the design, theory, and analysis of persuasive technologies” and “machines designed to influence human beliefs and behaviors”.
It is literally the science of “mind control” as implemented though computer interfaces and technology.
Here’s that Stanford University link again, in case you missed it the first time: http://captology.stanford.edu/