From Yahoo! News:
A Chinese man dropped dead after playing Internet games for three consecutive days, state media said.
The man from the southern boomtown of Guangzhou, aged about 30, died on Saturday after being rushed to the hospital from the Internet cafe, local authorities were quoted by the Beijing News as saying.
"Police have ruled out the possibility of suicide," the newspaper said, adding that exhaustion was the most likely cause of death. It did not say what game he was playing.
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This is not the first... Ah here we go:
http://editor.playwhat.com/index.php/2007/02/28/online-gaming-addiction…
Part of me wonders if this has any relation to "gold farming"; i.e. making money in-game to sell for real money. Hence the drive to exhaustion, as opposed to suicide (which seems to be the usual fate of obsessive game addicts).
Just speculating.
AFAIK, gold farmers tend to pace themselves, much like anybody else working at a job.
This incident is typical of an "addictive frenzy" -- that is, he got so locked into the immediate gratification of his electronic ur-droud, that he neglected or suppressed his bodily needs. While such frenzies don't usually go quite that far, they aren't particularly uncommon -- I myself once played Nethack for 22 hours straight in my college's terminal room. (The save function was broken in that release. ;-) )