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E-mailA couple in South Korea let their young daughter starve to death when they became addicted to caring for a virtual character in an online game, reports said on Friday.
Following an autopsy that revealed the malnourished condition of their daughter, father Kim Yoo-chul, 41, and mother Choi Mi-sun, 25, were charged with child abuse and neglect. They were formally arrested on Thursday, about five months after they reported the death of their baby.
Police investigators said that husband and wife, both unemployed, had become so completely preoccupied with the online world that they neglected their responsibilities as parents. They spent long hours in neighborhood Internet cafés, raising a virtual daughter named "Anima."
Prius Online, the multi-player role-playing game they were hooked on, is similar to the popular Second Life. Prius allows users to create a life in the virtual world, which includes choosing a job and interacting with others. Once a certain level is reached, a player can earn an extra avatar to nurture.
While the parents immersed themselves in the game, they would leave their child, who was three months old at the time of her death, all alone in their apartment in Suweon, a city that is south of Seoul.
On the morning of September 24, the couple called the police after coming back home from one overnight session to find their daughter dead. Detective Chung Jin-Won of the Suweon Seobu Police Station said, "They had spent 12 hours, all night at a PC bang (a Korean internet café)."
Investigators became suspicious when they observed how severely dehydrated the baby was. "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 reportedly confessed that they had fed their child rotten powdered milk and often spanked her. They had fled immediately after her funeral.
Kim's parents, worried about their addiction to the game, had been taking care of the baby for a time. Two weeks before she died, however, they had returned her to her mother and father.
Speaking to Yonhap news agency, Chung Jin-Won, a police officer, said, "The couple seemed to have lost their will to live a normal life because they didn't have jobs and gave birth to a premature baby. They indulged themselves in the online game of raising a virtual character so as to escape from reality, which led to the death of their real baby."
The two had met in 2008 through the Internet.
South Korea is one of the most "wired" countries in the world, and it has a hugely popular professional computer gaming industry. The Daily Mail reports critics as saying that the popularity comes as a steep price, with all sorts of bizarre incidents hitting the headlines. In August 2005, a 28-year-old man collapsed and died from heart failure due to exhaustion after playing Starcraft for 50 hours with few breaks.
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