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Everyone enjoys a good, relaxing game of something; be it a board game, computer game, video game, outdoor game or mind game. Games are created for us to enjoy at our leisure and for fun, they are there to elicit various emotions in our moments away from work, school and the like and for us to partake of either alone or with friends, forming a spirit of camaraderie.

Sadly, as we all know, there are those people out there that will always take things like this far too seriously than is healthy for any normal human being, turning a simple plaything of satisfaction into a fierce do-or-die competition, sometimes even with the “die” part being literal. This article lists but a few of those that have fallen by the wayside of life due – in part – to their unhealthy addiction to video games. Now, please note that we’re in no way implying that video games cause people to be violent, but please think of the article as being written in the spirit of “here be an example of them there crazy people that flip out and kill others for no raisin”.

A Sore Loser
It all kicked off (ha) when young James Callaghan lost three games of football on FIFA 2008 to his brother and a friend. He then took the highly illogical and actually pretty damn crazy course of drinking an entire bottle of vodka before arming himself with long knife and an axe. Now, while the Daily Mail might hasten to come to the conclusion that he was copying the game he was playing, let’s just remember that he was playing a football game and I can’t remember the last time I saw a footballer in a game embark upon a drunken murderous rampage with weapons (we leave that for the football fans to do, amirite?).

Now fully-armed with his weapons of choice, Callaghan went about his neighbourhood like…well…like a crazy person. He attacked and menaced several teens in the area before moving to the coup de grace of his rampage, where in the home of an elderly lady (aged 65), he laid the smackdown on her, raining blow upon blow, beating and stabbing her to death in her own house. After this, he then tried to break into the house next door, demanding even more alcohol.

It was later revealed that Callaghan was suffering from schizophrenia and typically became violent after drinking; so in all honesty, pretty much anything might have set him off on his rampage. If we look back and re-examine the facts, we’ll find that he was playing FIFA 2008. Anyone would go crazy playing that pile of crap.

The Curse of the Dragon Sabre
In Shanghai a few years back, a murder took place that was related to incredibly popular MMORPG Legend of Mir 3 (I say popular, it’s really only played in Asia, but by many, many people there).
Qiu Chengwei, 41, and Zhu Caoyuan, 26, jointly won a weapon in the online game known as the Dragon Sabre, of which they were no doubt very proud. That pride, however, would soon turn into HATRED and EVIL when Qiu loaned the Sabre to Zhu, only to have Zhu pull the ultimate in dick moves and sell it for the somewhat unprincely sum of 7200 yuan (a savings account-pleasing £473 or $870 back then).

Understandably, Qiu was pretty pissed at Zhu for selling the sword, so he goes to the local police. Sadly, because the item was virtual and not actually real-world property, there was nothing they could do. Furious, Qiu decided to take matters into his own hands, which essentially involved him breaking into Zhu’s house to stab him in the chest, piercing his heart and lung, killing him instantly. All over an item that was probably kind of rubbish anyway.

There’s Beaten, Then There’s Beaten to Death
Online MMOs are well-known for their guilds, or large factions of players that band together in order to tackle the game’s more demanding content. However, in games – as in life – sometimes a fierce rivalry can break out between these groups, which most of the time just serves to heighten the sense of competition, but sometimes things take a turn for the worse.

In Russia, players of Lineage II met in real life to settle a matter that had arisen in the game itself. The problem? Someone from one guild had killed (in-game, mind) the character of a player from another guild, their rival. Naturally, these veritable bastions of sense and reason decided to fight it out in the real world, because when you die in a game your first natural response is to go out and beat a man to d- actually, it probably is, but most of us have an ounce of sanity within us and will refrain from actual murder. Instead, we’ll just think it.

Anyway, what actually happened was that when the two guilds met, a vicious fight broke out, leaving one man so horrifically injured that he died on the way to the hospital. The moral of the story is: you die in the game, you die for real.

Tony Hawk Kills a Child (Sort of)
9-year-old Anthony Maldonado, a New Jersey resident, was stabbed to death by a 25-year-old family friend all due to an argument over incredibly rubbish game Tony Hawks: Ride. It just wasn’t worth it, whatever it was.

Allegedly, the two were playing the game on a PS3, when 25-year-old Alejandro Morales argued with the young boy over the game (sadly, there are little to no details about the argument itself, but it was probably over the game’s inherent shitness), which resulted in Morales stabbing Maldonado several times.

Shortly after being stabbed, the child managed to walk to his uncle’s room to inform him that he’d been stabbed. He died hours later after having been taken to hospital.

17 Stabs but Only One Kill? That’s a Terrible Score
15-year-old Ionut Silviu Savin took matters into his own hands when he decided to stab his own (adoptive) mother to death.

Being severely addicted to the internet can have its consequences and it was those consequences that his mother wanted to stop by refusing to pay the bills for his internet. To paraphrase the article, it was these bills that she’d end up paying for…WITH HER LIFE!

Ionut stabbed his adoptive mother a total of 17 times (which is usually indicative of some considerable instability) before heading out into town to a local internet cafe, where he proceeded to play the popular online shooter Counter-Strike for four hours. After probably getting owned and murdering everyone in the cafe (details on this are sketchy, read: non-existent), Ionut handed himself over to the police, confessing his crime.