How Important is Your Child?

Most of the time, people see video games as innocent fun, but what happens when the time used to play a video game takes away from the actual time parents could be spending with their own children? I guess two Korean parents thought their virtual baby was a little more important than the real one they would abandon at home on a regular basis. According to a blog post titled "Game over: Baby starves to death while parents play online" written by William Saletan from Slate, a man and a woman from South Korea met online. After the relationship got serious, a real baby came into the world. Unfortunately, the baby girl, who they had not even given a name, was premature and not worthy of their love. Instead of raising their own nameless daughter, they decided to raise a virtual baby on a website called Prius Online, a 3D community where people can find friends, a new job, or have a new baby. Virtual life became more important than reality. The virtual baby was important enough to have a name, Anima. People constantly become addicted to online worlds because they either do not want to face reality or they just cannot pull themselves away from their computer screens. Two of these addicts were the parents of this baby girl. Every day they would leave their baby for extended periods of time in order to take care of Anima in their local Internet cafe. They would return home and feed their own baby powdered milk and then go back into "virtuality." One day they left their baby girl for twelve hours. When they returned, she was dead. According to the autopsy, the little girl died of malnutrition and dehydration. No child should be abandoned like that. Computers and any type of technology are normally fun but in moderate amounts. Nothing should exceed the importance of your own flesh and blood. The baby girl is not the only incident. Two Korean men died from exhaustion and another, sick of his mother nagging him for being in an online world too much, decided to kill her. There is an unseen war going on between the worlds of reality and "virtuality." If I were you, I would take Saletan's advice: "The dead baby is just another casualty of this war between the worlds-- a war increasingly dominated by the world in which you're reading this. So get the hell out of here. Go kiss your spouse, hug your kids, or walk down the hall and say hello to your colleagues. There's a beautiful world out there. Live in it."