A 15-year-old teenager from Columbus, Ohio found himself in the hospital without an Xbox 360 after a marathon gaming session left him severely dehydrated.
Tyler Rigby apparently played the wildly popular Modern Warfare 3 for four consecutive days. When Rigby finally emerged from his room to take a much needed break, he ended up fainting in front of family members and was rushed to the hospital.
“It’s like he was looking at me but he wasn’t there. It was like he was looking through me,” Jennifer Thompson, Tyler’s aunt, told CBS. “We were talking and I heard a thump and I looked over and he just fell.”
The boy’s mother, Jessie Rawlins, says that he came out of his room and “fell over” three times.
“I was very scared. I thought he was going to die. He just fell over three times,” she said.
Tyler was given fluids at the hospital and is expected to make a full recovery. However, the teen’s gaming privileges will not, as the Xbox 360 has been uncermoniously removed from his home.
Of course, blaming insanely long gaming marathons for severe injuries or even death is hardly anything new.
Indeed, a Taiwanese teenager died last month after playing Diablo III for nearly 40 hours straight and subsequently collapsing in a public Internet café. Medical investigators believe the long hours spent in a single sedentary position could have caused some sort of cardiovascular problem that led to the teen’s death.
