As much as I ended up hating WoW, I can't help but feel outraged at Blizzard getting sued for some dumbshit 13-yr old jumping to his death to re-enact a scene from the game. I think they mean the scene in the game where you jump off a cliff and die horribly regardless of what level or armor you have. You know, they keep forgetting the levels of constant and pervasive Kubrickian violence in movies, TV, and comics, probably because games are "interactive" and therefore more influential.
Let me tell ya something. You know what's interactive? When I was a kid we had life-like gun replicas before they had to be colored like toys. We had ninja swords and fake blood, pop-cap pistols, fireworks, and midgetized O.K. corral shoot-out sets at the park. Then we'd go there and take it out on each other until some kid got hurt, cried, bloodied, wiped up, and back to keep pchoo pchooing with the rest. We would mix household chemicals and pesticides into secret concoctions of death to back up the rubber-band guns and paperclip maces we made that could easily have left us blind. I got flung off a merry-go-round once and ate dirt 5ft away.
Maybe the problem with games is that they aren't interactive enough. Maybe we learned our lesson because kids did get maimed. Maybe that's how our fragile little psyches avoided corruption. So how about making laser tag legal again? I can't believe we got arrested at 4am running around having the time of our lives in an abandoned park. Don't you get it? Laser tag meant we were sick of shooting it out in virtual De_Dust in virtual Iraq with virtual glocks.
I know why this stupid chinese kid jumped to his death. In China you only get one kid. You aren't going to let him shoot a paintball gun or go bungie jumping or wipe his own ass. So, being sick of an entire life at a study desk, he wanted to see some sunlight. Too bad he was a noob at it, if he had some practice I'm sure he would have survived to enjoy his BASE jump.
Live a little people, or you're gonna die the first time you try.