Personal Responsibility

Last week, I wrote on a Singaporean man who was suing Resort World Sentosa after losing S$26 million at the casino. I had written that sympathy for the man wasn’t high in Singapore because most Singaporeans thought the man should have known better.

Basically, the man should have taken personal responsibility for his actions.

That’s what I will say to a man in the U.S as well. In America, Craig Smallwood is suing game publisher, NCsoft, for making a game “addictive”. Mr. Smallwood is a player in the MMORPG, Lineage II, and has been playing the game for over 20,000 hours in the last 5 years. That’s about 11 hours a day for 5 years! Mr. Smallwood is now suing NCsoft for “not warning him in advance” that the game is so addictive that he was unable to function normally in real life.

Seriously, I do not know if I should laugh or cry at this? I do not know badly Mr. Smallwood “suffered” playing the game but was NCsoft supposed to published a bad game? Now I heard of video game addiction before but how is it NCsoft’s fault that a player went and play a game 11 hours a day for 5 years? There’s such a thing as an “off” button on PCs right?

Unfortunately, that does not matter nowadays as personal responsibility seems to be a term modern men do not understand.