Cosplay can either be awesome, or a pair of hairy legs sticking out from underneath a sweaty pot belly and extremely tight spandex. While this category is fairly subjective, we're willing to bet that most would agree that the fetished-out pleather Birdo below (originating from 4chan, the reigning king of disturbing crap) is undeniably a strong contender.
Many of these statistics involve epic online gaming binges and noticeably tend to originate in China and Korea. Lee Seung Seop, for example, famously died after 50 hours of StarCraft in an internet cafe. What makes our research difficult is that, unlike in Seop's story, the exact name of the game being played is often left out - a Chinese gamer, for example,died after three daysof playing some unnamed online game.
Besides exhaustion, gamers have also been killed as a direct result of in-game actions - Zhu Caoyuan, for example, was murdered after selling a friend's virtual sword (which was on loan to him) in a popular Chinese MMO. We've also heard stories about babies dying due to neglect while their parents play games (though these stories often exclude other important details).
So which game's death toll reigns supreme? We don't have a definite statistic, but we'll guess StarCraft, with WoW a close second. Upon its release, we expect StarCraft II to take the blame for more deaths than every other game combined.
Guinness Trivia: The number of copies of StarCraft sold in 2006 in South Korea accounts for over one third of total StarCraft sales. Not mentioned in the book, but also relevant: South Korea has just changed its official flag to a silhouette of a Terran Dropship.
