I'm not attempting to call your friends death "sensationalist bullshit", let's be clear on that. I'm calling the overall trend of people picking some new techno

I'm not attempting to call your friends death "sensationalist bullshit", let's be clear on that. I'm calling the overall trend of people picking some new technology/activity and portraying it as the end-all sensationalist bullshit. I'm not trying to protect video games, I've long since stopped playing them. I'm just trying to approach this from a more realistic angle. If you want to be in denial and not recognize a friend's addiction and mental health issues, that is understandable but a bad path to choose. I've seen addiction time and time again. I don't know your friend, it's possible he was addicted to video games and just drank a Heineken here and there and that the alcohol was purely incidental to his demise. However, I've seen this type of thing happen on several occasions. Someone has an addiction, be it alcohol, cocaine, or heroin. They lock themselves away from everyone and indulge in their habit. As a side-effect of that, they wind up doing something fairly low-energy like watching TV, surfing the internet, or playing video games. Ultimately, their organs start to fail and they wind up dead or near-death in the ER. I've been to the funerals, I've seen the jaundiced, malnourished bodies, I've had to help clean up the aftermath, both emotional and physical. I'm sure your friend was a good guy who couldn't shake his problems, and I don't mean to make light of anything. I've seen too many otherwise good people die of substance abuse, and I know several members of my family will likely still die in a similar manner. Saying someone died "as a result of playing video games" is a cop-out for not wanting to admit someone had an addiction to other substances, whatever the reason may be. Your liver doesn't fail because you played too much Halo. It's sad, but it's the truth.