A Couple Video Game-related Stories

Woman pepper sprays shoppers at Wal-Mart to grab Xbox 360

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What would you do to ensure you get the best gaming deals on Black Friday? Would you pepper spray an entire Wal-Mart aisle to get those video games for your kids? One seriously messed up woman did — all for an Xbox 360.

One unidentified lady thought it was acceptable to pepper spray the shopping monsters at a Los Angeles Wal-Mart to get an Xbox 360. And she got away with it, too. She apparently paid for all her items before the cops arrived. It's absolutely insane!

According to another shopper Alejandra Seminario:

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"People started screaming, pulling and pushing each other, and then the whole area filled up with pepper spray" the Sylmar resident said.

The pepper spray wafted through the air, Seminario said, and she breathed some in and started coughing. Her face also started itching.

"After we paid, we saw five that were in really bad shape," she said. "They had been sprayed in the face, it looked like, and they had swelling of the face, really extreme swelling of face, redness, coughing."

What the fuck? I know Black Friday sales have a long and bloody history, but this is a whole other level of stupidity. It doesn't say in this article, but I read somewhere else that the reason she sprayed people was because she was feeling "threatened" at the time.

...It's Black Friday, you're in Wal-Mart, you KNEW there'd be a hundred other people grabbing for the same item. That is NO REASON to pepper spray people. Good lord, I'm surprised nobody got killed. It could have easily turned into a stampede of people trying to get away.

Apparently she was able to walk out and buy the Xbox, but later handed herself into police. The police released her pending investigation.

Onto the next story:

Mother Says World of Warcraft Turned Her Child Into Aggressive School-Skipping Hunchback

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A mother writes in to Australia's Telegraph to complain that World of Warcraft has turned her 13-year-old son into an aggressive computer addict who skips school and threatens violence if pulled away from his game.

She says the boy, who is bigger than she is, missed most of his schooling this year and most of last year as well. She's tried talking to him, can't physically move him because he outweighs her, and has even gotten the school and police involved.
"We have spoken to the school and they have spoken to him but he is not worried about it at all," she writes. "We have called the police because he gets aggressive when you take the computer away.

"He starts punching holes through the walls, throwing things around and threatening you."

She said before buying the game for her son two years ago he was a healthy kid who liked to play sports, now, she says, he's even going slightly hunchbacked.

The anonymous writer isn't writing to cast blame on games, but as a call for help. There is no support for this sort of problem in Australia, she writes, because computer addiction is so relatively new.

She believes this is true addiction, something you can't tackle by simply taking away the computer.

"You are dealing with aggression, anger, swearing, pushing, punching," she writes. "We need support from the government to open up facilities around Australia, places for children to wean off it."

She's tried everything, including having mental health services come to her home and speaking to a judge. A psychiatrist is suggesting putting the boy into the hospital because his health is deteriorating.

I feel pretty bad for this woman, but surely she could have just inquired with Blizzard to have the account blocked, even doing it in a sneaky way like saying he was trying to sell his account or something. Blizzard does crap like that all the time. It's terrible that the boy is using his size against her, that sort of situation is always really hard to deal with. I think it's quite honorable that she's not blaming the game herself, just her son's addiction. I hope she gets some sort of help.

Is it bad that my first thought was: 'At least no one died this year'?

Also: this is what happens when you buy an 11-year-old a game like WoW, lady.

Fortunately, the mainstream press in the US hasn't been playing up the video game aspect of the first story. Instead, it's all been about the spraying happening on Black Friday and the horrors of manic consumerism. The crowd could just as easily have been fighting over microwaves or some toy.

Aggie, you must've missed this year's "Shoppers step over dying man" story.

I read somewhere that the stuff that happens on Black Friday isn't actually that un-typical, it's just more widely reported and sometimes exacerbated by the actions of store staff etc. I don't think going in with pepper spray is all that typical though.

Seule, it's not as atypical as it appears; it's just that events that happen all the time and normally get no attention beyond maybe the local news become headlines because they fit the "Black Friday Chaos!" narrative. The truth is that this affects so much of what does or doesn't appear on the news; if something fits the story they want to tell, it's more likely to get their attention. And this story also included one of this season's hot topics, pepper spray. [No pun or store reference intended, for once.] A year ago, the incident might've gone unnoticed, even on Black Friday, but this year, after Bologna and Pike and all, the press are on the lookout any potential story involving pepper spray. A year from now, it might be unremarkable again.

Drabbler wrote:

Aggie, you must've missed this year's "Shoppers step over dying man" story.

...I did indeed. ''