Death by Xbox

I’ve been out of the loop all of yesterday and most of today, but I still want to talk about yesterday’s Sun front page, which I saw at work and immediately took a disdain to, having read the facts of the case:

The facts are quite simple: 20-year-old “gaming addict” Chris Staniforth died of deep-vein thrombosis a few hours after playing on his Xbox for “12-hour stints”, though his actual demise came about outside the local Jobcentre.

Compare that summary to The Sun’s utterly disingenuous headline, which would suggest almost that the Xbox had literally killed Chris, maybe by magically zapping him with some X-ray death beam from across the room after 12-hours of utter mental torture at the hands of the Halo and Call of Duty satanists.

Actually, if you read it for a third time, they shoot themselves in the foot in the subtitle alone. There is nothing to link the thrombosis that killed Chris to his Xbox but for the fact he’d have to sit for hours in the same position to play it. A lot like you’d have to sit for long periods without moving for a lot of things: travelling by air, in the cinema, working in an office building, chained to a computer all day, maybe crunching numbers, maybe… writing a newspaper…

What irritates me about this sort of story is the almost-laughable attempt by the newspapers to jump on the old, flogged-to-death “VIDEO GAMES KILL!” bandwagon, which has time and again been proven to be a nonsense.  That said, The Sun is already on some kind of vendetta against the Nintendo 3DS, portraying that device as some sort of devilish toy that exists solely to cause instantaneous nausea and migraines though it’s wicked 3D technology.

The parents of Chris even say that:

"I'm not for one minute blaming the manufacturer of Xbox. It isn't their fault that people use them for so long. But I want to highlight the dangers that can arise.

"Playing on it for so long is what killed him - and I don't want another child to die."

Remember how The Sun described the 2011 winner of the Apprentice, Tom Pellerau, as “nerdy”; no doubt because he spent his time dreaming up innovative and clever ideas and, probably looked like the archetypal brainbox?

What is this paper’s problem with the “intellectual”, almost?!

The real issue in this story is not that this guy played his Xbox way more than The Sun arbitrarily deems “normal”, that but that he was struck down by a condition that could happen to anyone – even newspaper journalists in their seats writing this tripe. Isn’t that ironic? But never mentioned, of course.

I managed to read the inside of the paper today and caught a glimpse of their “Sun Says” this-is-what-we-want-you-to-think preachy column, and, lo and behold, they went on the predictable “good ol’ days” rant Read in in a stereotypical grand-pappy voice; it but completes the illusion. All we need really is “god damn whippersnappers!”:

Forty years ago, when TVs were on only occasionally and games consoles were science fiction, it would have been unheard of not to get up and walk for an entire day.

The sad death of Chris Staniforth should be a warning to all Xbox and PlayStation 3 addicts.

Take a break from that shoot-em-up. Or it could cost your REAL life.

How witty. It’s just a shame The Sun couldn’t have drawn people’s attention to the dangers, almost, of DVT without totally ruining it by going on a Luddite-esque, almost, tangent with their disingenuous headline and editorial.

I’m disappointed by The Sun, here, but alas, not surprised at all. Times, they’re a-changin’. Though it would be ironic for a newspaper to fully comprehend modern, technological life when it’s their bread-and-butter on the way out, wouldn’t it?