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EARTHDATE: October 17, 2010

Official News page 7


REAL LIFE NEWS: VIDEO GAMES CAUSE INJURIES

by Hazed

We're used to reading news stories about how playing video games warps the minds of impressionable youths and corrupts our children. But now comes a report showing that there are serious physical side-effects too.

Americans sustained 696 of these injuries between 2004 and 2009, to be precise. This figure comes from the US National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. 92 of these were from using Wii-style controllers which require you to exert yourself physically, so these are not so surprising. But the rest came from the usual sedentary games.

The news report I read gave no information about just what kind of injuries we are talking about here, or how they were sustained. For the Wii games you can imagine all kinds of sprains and strains in feet, shoulders and ankles caused by wild swings of the remote.

But how do you injure yourself playing ordinary games? Finger, wrist and hand injuries caused by excessive pushing of buttons, perhaps? Head injuries from banging your bonce on the monitor when games get too frustrating? High blood-pressure from the anxiety and stress of combat games? Who knows.

More intriguing are the bystander injuries reported, both in the interactive Wii-style games and also in the traditional games - but as you would expect, far more of them involving interactive games. I imagine it's quite easy to hit your opponent across the face with a Wii controller...

But as expected, the fact that the average age of those injured was 16.5 has resulted in scary-sounding pronouncements. The lead author of the study, Peter O'Toole, said, "Children under the age of 10 should be supervised while video games are being played to prevent bystander injuries."

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