Five-month old Mikara Ranui Jarius Reti from New Zealand died on the evening of January 11 this year. His mother found him alone with her partner, 21-year old Trent Owen Ngaruhe Hapuku, who has now been charged with manslaughter. The baby’s death resulted from critical blunt-force injury to the baby’s liver, which severed it and fractured four of his ribs.
A horrifying story, for sure. So quite why New Zealand news site Stuff.co.nz felt the need to lead said story with the fact that Hapuku was “found trying to play a PlayStation game as the baby was dying on his shoulder” is anyone’s guess.
Except, of course, this is nothing new. There have been a number of cases of child neglect and death supposedly linked to video games, with the tale of the Farmville mom being one of the most recent. But look at the details and it’s clear to see that video games were not the cause of death in any of these cases. Sure, Farmville mom Alexandra Tobias admitted that she shook her three-year old son to death as a result of him “interrupting” her. But this doesn’t mean that Farmville directly caused the death of her child. Her supposed “addiction” to the Facebook game was a symptom of her problems, not the cause of the tragedy.
Similarly, in this case, the fact Hapuku was playing a PlayStation game at the time the baby’s body was found on his shoulder is irrelevant. He was demonstrating neglect of the child, but that’s not the fault of video games. It makes for a good headline, though. Everybody hates video games, right? They’re a terrible influence on society—look at them, attracting his attention away from a dying infant! Never mind the fact that Hapuku himself doesn’t have a good explanation as to how the child received his injuries—video games are bad and wrong! Never mind the fact that a poor family is having to deal with the death of a child—blame games!
It’s a shame. For all the positive press that video games get these days, for all the good that they do, sometimes it just takes one story like this to allow the anti-games brigade to feel vindicated.
The moral of this story, then? If you find yourself with a dead or critically injured child on your shoulder, whether or not it’s your fault, what should you do?
For Heaven’s sake; for the sake of the poor child and their family; and for the sake of gamers the world over, pick up the phone, not the controller.
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