I’m working on a story about video gaming, and I came across this AP story this morning on the Drudge Report. It talks about video game addiction in South Korea, the world’s most connected country — 70% of South Koreans have broadband access.

Says the AP: The habit has even been deadly: In August, a28-year-old man died after nearly 50 straight hours of playing onlinecomputer games. The man, whom police refused to identify by name, wasmoved to a hospital after he collapsed while gaming and died threehours later.

And that’s actually the 2nd guy who’s died from video gaming in S. Korea. And check this out:

Computer games can also be a path to bigrewards. Three cable channels are devoted to broadcasting game matchesand a total of 4.5 billion won ($4.4 million) is given out as prizemoney in competitions each year.

Even the government is embracing electronic sports, or “E-sports,”funding construction of the world’s first e-sports stadium, to becompleted by 2008, where online competitions will be displayed on hugescreens.

Yeah, Algebars is nice, but it’s no e-sports stadium.

Seven Days’ deputy publisher and co-owner Cathy Resmer is a writer, editor and advocate for local journalism. She works in the paper’s Burlington office and lives vicariously through the reporters while raising money to pay them. Cathy started at Seven Days as a freelance writer in 2001 and still has the Rolodex to prove it. As the paper’s first online editor, she launched Seven Days email newsletters and started the paper’s first social media accounts. Cathy has overseen Kids VT, Vermont’s...