Man Stabbed in Internet Cafe, Gamer Plays On
- Thread starter Andy Chalk
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The disturbing thing is that the news is in plural, not singular, by that I mean the bystanderS did nothing. I knew many people that suffered from this addiction to gaming, not unlike the addiction to gambling I dare say, people who would gladly miss BIG events to "defend a castle", people who'd totally discard a real life relationship in order to get more gaming time, and in a much less worrying level (but very annoying) people who'd somehow "lose" their ability to communicate in society, by that I mean talking about non-game issues or even talking in a coherent manner at all. If anybody is interested in a very fucking touching view on the subject, go to Penny Arcade > Extra Credits, I ddon't know the episode sorry, but one of the big guys behind the show declares how he suffered from this very form of "alienation from society" and the extremely bad impact it had on his life and that of people who cared for him.
Please: I used the term addiction broadly here...
Usually, in situations like this (murder before ones eyes) people will just freeze, maybe run away, they'll seldom help, and maybe that's because they get too damn scared by something that is alien to them. But it's a far stretch from FREEZING to downright IGNORING the event in order to, I dunno, not missing you score? I remember a video, you guys can check it out in Ganglands, and probably on Youtube: it's a cassino in Las Vegas and everyone is there totally glued to those pickpocket machines, that's when a Mongol MC member walks in (a President I think), like just walking apparently, suddenly the room fills in with Hells Angels and they stab the guy to death, more Mongols show up, but then the cops also show up and the killing stops, POINT is, the people stepped the fuck away, they didn't act like heroes (and I don't blame them AT ALL) but at least they reacted by running away, screaming, or even watching but FROZEN IN TERROR, not just like "fucking bikers, I'll keep playing my game..."
I say this is sad, it indicates a person with a fucking huge hole in her life, one that she's filling with fantasy (a game in this case, but it could be a book, a TV Show, whatever, it would be just as bad), and in such despair that she ignores the real world, no one died by her side, the real world matters not to her, only the game, where MAYBE she feels she's part of.
Please: I used the term addiction broadly here...
Usually, in situations like this (murder before ones eyes) people will just freeze, maybe run away, they'll seldom help, and maybe that's because they get too damn scared by something that is alien to them. But it's a far stretch from FREEZING to downright IGNORING the event in order to, I dunno, not missing you score? I remember a video, you guys can check it out in Ganglands, and probably on Youtube: it's a cassino in Las Vegas and everyone is there totally glued to those pickpocket machines, that's when a Mongol MC member walks in (a President I think), like just walking apparently, suddenly the room fills in with Hells Angels and they stab the guy to death, more Mongols show up, but then the cops also show up and the killing stops, POINT is, the people stepped the fuck away, they didn't act like heroes (and I don't blame them AT ALL) but at least they reacted by running away, screaming, or even watching but FROZEN IN TERROR, not just like "fucking bikers, I'll keep playing my game..."
I say this is sad, it indicates a person with a fucking huge hole in her life, one that she's filling with fantasy (a game in this case, but it could be a book, a TV Show, whatever, it would be just as bad), and in such despair that she ignores the real world, no one died by her side, the real world matters not to her, only the game, where MAYBE she feels she's part of.
This is not the least bit surprising to me. Any faith I had left in humanity was lost when I first read about Kitty Genovese [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese].
What proof is there that the onlookers were gaming? You can use internet cafes for other things, unless Asia has laws against checking your email. The source cited also didn't have any text in it (you have to pay) so maybe it is explained there and noone can actually check.
We've had people who literally died of thirst and exhaustion playing videogames like Diablo 2. It's not too surprising that somebody might be similarly incapable of realizing what's going on with others, if there are people who are incapable of realizing what's going on with their own bodies while playing. That said, apparently this wasn't just the blood-spatter-girl, but the other patrons as well? That's different then, of course.
That's an unfortunate truth which I can second. I'm an Indian myself, and this is the reason that the society there sometimes hates me so much. Someone should fucking get off their high horses there and do something about it.Waaghpowa said:
OT- Fear, I'll chalk it up to that. I can't really say anything else, but why did no one else do anything? She can't have been the only one there...
It's actually very easy to do depending on the enviroment your used to, and how you've trained your reactions. As I've mentioned before I grew up in residential facilities and the like due to the way my brain damage effected me, I was pretty mssed up. However in such an enviroment you have kids flipping out all the time, fights, and of course teachers and staff doing all kinds of stupid things themselves. You also wind up having very limited/controlled time for everything, so you learn to zone it out and focus on whatever your doing, even when kids are say jumping off desksLegion said:
and stuff in front of you.
It's also something I wound up refining when I worked casino security, because if I'm say writing a report on an incident I handled, I kind of have to zone out what else might be going on at any given moment, so I can do what I have to do, and then get back out there (so to speak).
There is also the general nature of organized crime in certain areas, combined with concern over penelties from the actual authorities for getting involved. The whole "Kitty Genevieve" incident really happened (it's referanced in Watchmen as well, Rorscharch's mask being made from her dress), that's a case where a girl was literally chased down and stabbed to death in front of a bunch of bystanders, but nobody wanted to get involved and intervene due to fear of the repercussions from tha law, both civil and criminal.
The point being is that fear of either element is why someone might intentionally "zone out" and act like nothing is happening, and if they come from an enviroment where "it's better to not get involved" has been a survival mechanism for a while, this can be pretty common. Understand that one display of power made by criminals, even here in the US, is how some gang banger might come up and blow some dude away in the middle of the street in front of witnesses. The point being that nobody is going to say or do crap because they are afraid of what his people are going to do to them if they do.
You'll notice that while terrifying, the lack of reaction among the lady we're paticularly looking at also kept her out of the press, which could very well be the entire point.... it worked, and thus such behavior is encouraged.
Now I'm not saying any of these things are nessicarly true in this situation, just that I understand how it can happen, and we also see it in the US.
To be honest I blame liberals in the US for a lot of it. No matter how many times we've effectively tried to extend "good samaritan" type laws to extend to people intervening in assaults, they inevitably wind up backfiring. Complaints about excessive force, discrimination, or seriously slamming people who *ahem* didn't know what was going on, when they get involved. Heck, it's gotten to the point where there is so much anti-violence garbage and protection/recourse for criminals that you can't even defend your own home in many cases without opening up
the possibility of being sued by say a gun toting intruder.
Case in point, your walking down the street, some dude comes running out chasing a girl with a butcher knife and grabs her. If you jump in and take the guy down with extreme predjudice, using whatever is at hand, and really there is no other way to fight if you don't want to risk getting yourself killed or prevent him from stabbing anyone else, you open up all kinds of doors if it's some kind of domestic and they both claim "they were just playing", or how you misunderstood the situation. If the guy happens to be a minority and your not, he can also play the race card and say your reaction was based on discrimination. Even if you can protect yourself criminally, that doesn't mean you can protect yourself civilly if he comes after you for injuries, damage to reputation, or whatever other piece of garbage could be thrown at you. In some states it's outright illegal to intervene, since anyone in a confrontation is under obligation to flee, as a way of cutting down on general violence. As a citizen unless your personally threatened and for some reason unable to flee the scene, your only legal recourse is to try and contact the authorities. The arguement being bureaucratically that it's better to have a few people stabbed to death (or whatever) while nobody reacts than open the door to thousands of ambigious cases of assault, self defense, etc... many of which are going to carry every legal trick in the book on both sides (claims of discrimination, etc...) which represent a "no win scenario" for the state where it's going to take flak no matter what it does, as well as spending tons of resources prosecuting what
could be very long and complicated cases.
In short we live in a truely borked world, while I don't agree with this, I at least understand it. I especially understand it when you consider the sheer level of power organized crime has in Asia, and we're probably dealing with a lot of relatively poor people involved in that. After all the crowd was using systems to game in an internet cafe, which while not uncommon (yet) puts them outside the group of increasingly successful Koreans who have their own computers (which is growing apparently). Right now you can make a degree of "class" judgement simply based on an enviroment, more so than you might have been able to in years past. As I said above, this could very well be a case where everyone involved figures the stabbing is gang/organized crime related, and nobody says/does anything or reacts out of fear. Some are just better/more trained than others. Their perspective could very well be it's better to let someone get butchered and do absolutly nothing, than be the next one butchered.
you know what was probably going through their head?
"oh god that guy has a knife, holy shit is he going to kill that persOH GOD THEY DID! ok, don't react, pretend not to have noticed, oh god please don't kill me too please please please please please oh godohgodohgod"
would you people have preferred that she did something and got killed too? if you look at the reaction of everyone else, helping wouldn't have done anything, she'd have died and the people who pretended not to notice wouldn't have lifted a finger.
"oh god that guy has a knife, holy shit is he going to kill that persOH GOD THEY DID! ok, don't react, pretend not to have noticed, oh god please don't kill me too please please please please please oh godohgodohgod"
would you people have preferred that she did something and got killed too? if you look at the reaction of everyone else, helping wouldn't have done anything, she'd have died and the people who pretended not to notice wouldn't have lifted a finger.
Right, because there was no way she was pretending to play so as not to attract the murderous attention of the knife-wielding maniac killing someone right next to her.
Kinda glad this didnt happen in the US, mostly cause this would have been cannon fodder for violence in videogames and fox news would have just ran with it.
still that sucks, but its not such a surprise when most of the stories I see of this type of stuff (people dying/being seriously hurt because videogames are a factor in either the hurting or lack of help after) come from this area. which isnt a generalization of the place, just a lot of stories come from here.
EDIT:
still that sucks, but its not such a surprise when most of the stories I see of this type of stuff (people dying/being seriously hurt because videogames are a factor in either the hurting or lack of help after) come from this area. which isnt a generalization of the place, just a lot of stories come from here.
EDIT:
Not every news article is/has to be about videogames.Sam17 said:
I am sorry, but did anyone actually watch the video linked in the op? The clip is quite short, but to me it seems like everyone that saw the stabbing got up from their computers, and either stared or took a few steps back from the (now bleeding) person on the ground. Yes they didn't sprint towards the victim or something and the people on the other side of the screen (who due to that really didn't see anything, not to mention that they had headsets, me thinks...) were the ones that didn't react.
Again, we don't see what happens after the ones next to the victim jump out of their seats, so anything could have happened after that but so far that seems like a pretty reasonable reaction to me.
I guess I am missing something here?
Again, we don't see what happens after the ones next to the victim jump out of their seats, so anything could have happened after that but so far that seems like a pretty reasonable reaction to me.
I guess I am missing something here?
Im sorry, but thats just not right. There must be something seriously wrong with those people. I mean, I can imagen anyone just ignoring something like that. Thats the kind of crap you would se on TV shows like Law & Order... not real life...Andy Chalk said:Man Stabbed in Internet Cafe, Gamer Plays On
The stabbing of a man in a Taiwan internet cafe attracted depressingly little response from bystanders.
The April 3 stabbing death of a man at an internet cafe in Kaohsiung, Taiwan is disturbing not just because of the violent nature of the crime but because of the reaction of cafe patrons who witness the attack - or, more specifically, the non-reaction. Video of the killing indicates that none of the witnesses did anything to stop the murder, and worse, one gamer who was so close to the killing that blood splattered onto her clothes ignored the whole thing and continued to play her game.
A brief clip of security camera footage released by Shenzhen Satellite TV [http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNTM5MjA5MjY0.html] shows the crowd doing virtually nothing while the victim falls and the perpetrator walks away, although the report apparently doesn't speak to the unmoved gamer or mention what she was playing.
This sort of crowd paralysis isn't an uncommon reaction to such events but even so, I cannot imagine what could possibly be interesting enough to distract a person from a murder being committed just a few feet away - especially when she's literally being sprayed with blood.
Source: Tech In Asia [http://www.techinasia.com/taiwanese-gamer-witnesses-murder-internet-cafe-playing-games-bloodstained-clothes/]
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Thats sounds a little better, i guess. Also, the link doesnt work for me...hmmmpsyco said:
Isn't this called the bystander effect?
Like isn't a proven psychological thing that people are less likely to help someone when other people are around.
Like isn't a proven psychological thing that people are less likely to help someone when other people are around.