A 15-year-old minor in India is reported to have killed his older brother after a confrontation about playingPlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. According to ZeeNews, the boy’s 19-year-old brother, Mohammad Shaikh, had scolded him this morning for playingPlayerUnknown’s Battlegroundson the phone, and had demanded that the young boy stop playing.
Instead of putting the game away, the younger brother allegedly assaulted Shaikh, banging his head against a wall repeatedly and stabbing him with a pair of scissors multiple times. After the police attended the scene, Mohammad was sent to the hospital where he succumbed to his wounds and passed away.
According to the India-based news outlet, a murder case against the younger brother has been opened by the police. Given what was reported so far, it looks like a pretty straightforward case, and an absolutely tragic one.
The game has already beenbanned in certain parts of Indiadue to its addictive nature, with press outlets like the Navbharat Times declaring that ‘many children have lost their mental balance’ due to the game. This year, the World Health Organization officially gave the go-ahead to declare video game addiction a disease, and it’s one that is felt in all corners of the world: there are many children who have been sent to rehab byFortnite, and a more recent viral video showed an Indian groom refusing to stop playingPlayerUnknown’s Battlegroundsat his own wedding.
It’s important for parents to control their child’s screen time, especially with many free-to-play games encouraging users to keep checking back consistently throughout the day. While the full details of the altercation between the minor and his brother have yet to be revealed, it’s a tragedy that one hopes could have been avoided by earlier intervention.
This isn’t the first video game-related killing to take place in June, as last week in Detroit avideo-game-sale-turned-shootoutresulted in at least one fatality, and a week before that an 11-year-old child from North Carolina was forced to use a machete to defend himself from a video game thief.
