The parents of a 13-year-old gaming-addicted girl in China’s Henan province got the shock of their lives when they learned that she had spent 449,500 yuan ($63,000) on mobile games.

Imagine checking the savings account you’ve been putting money into for years and seeing it depleted overnight. That’s exactly how one mother in China felt when she discovered that someone had left only 0.5 yuan of the 449,500 yuan ($63,000) she and her husband had been saving for years. More shocking still was the discovery that the culprit had been her teen daughter, who had been using the woman’s debit card to fuel her video game addiction. The girl had managed to deplete the savings account in about four months but managed to keep her spending habit a secret from her mother by deleting all banking history from her phone.

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A Chinese family recently sued Chinese gaming giant Tencent after their two children were left fighting for their lives a after jumping off of a building to see if they would come back to life like their favorite video game characters.

The two siblings, aged 11 and 9, reportedly became addicted to popular video games Mini World and Game of Peace during the lockdown caused by the spread of the SarsCov-2 virus. Their parents had bought them a smartphone, and they would spend up to eight hours a day playing the two mobile games at the family home in Handan, China. On March 22, the two children jumped off of the family’s 50-foot-tall residential building to see if they would come back to life, just like their video game avatars. The pair were critically injured, breaking numerous bones, and required several surgical procedures.

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The World Health Organisation recently recognised video game addiction as a mental health condition, and while that decision may seem strange to some, stories like the one presented here could serve as an explanation.

Tencent’s insanely popular mobile video game “King of Glory” is once again getting some bad publicity in Asian media, after allegedly getting one 25-year-old Malaysian man so addicted that he decided to divorce his wife of six years because she sold his account in the hopes that he would spend more time with her and their daughter. In the past, King of Glory was linked to the death of a popular Chinese streamer who allegedly spent most of his nights playing the game, and to the blindness of a woman who played the popular MOBA for three days straight.

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