The parents of a 13-year-old gaming-addicted girl in China’s Henan province got the shock of their lives when they learned that she had spent 449,500 yuan ($63,000) on mobile games.

Imagine checking the savings account you’ve been putting money into for years and seeing it depleted overnight. That’s exactly how one mother in China felt when she discovered that someone had left only 0.5 yuan of the 449,500 yuan ($63,000) she and her husband had been saving for years. More shocking still was the discovery that the culprit had been her teen daughter, who had been using the woman’s debit card to fuel her video game addiction. The girl had managed to deplete the savings account in about four months but managed to keep her spending habit a secret from her mother by deleting all banking history from her phone.

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A father who caught his young son playing video games on his phone at 1 am on a school night punished him by making him play on his phone until he could play no more.

Too much of a good thing becomes harmful or bothersome over a large period of time, and one Chinese boy from Shenzen found this out the hard way a couple of days ago, when his father caught him playing video games on his phone after midnight, despite knowing he had to get up for school the next morning. The parent told the Metropolis Times that he was furious when he found his son playing on his phone when he should have been sound asleep, but he didn’t know how to react at first. He wanted to teach the boy a lesson he wouldn’t easily forget, so instead of scolding the boy he just told him that he could play on his phone instead of sleeping, adding that he could even take a day off from school so he could play some more.

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A Chinese gamer recently went viral after claiming that he has been paid by the parents of at least two kids to beat them at online video games and crush their confidence.

Video games are generally pretty harmless if played in moderation, but in many cases nowadays children become so obsessed with these made-up virtual worlds that they start to ignore their real lives, school, and even their families. Getting them back on track can be a real challenge, and many parents turn to desperate measures. In China, for example, some parents sign their kids up for military-style camps, while others use sneakier techniques like hiring skilled gamers to beat their kids at their favorite video games and convince them to quit.

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‘I Am Jesus Christ’, a controversial video game that literally lets you play as the Messiah, from His birth to His crucifixion and subsequent resurrection, recently became playable on Steam.

We wrote about I Am Jesus Christ in 2019, back when it was first announced by indie developer SimulaM. The premise of the game was as bold as its title suggested – it put players in the shoes of the Son of God, from his birth to his resurrection, allowing them to perform all sorts of biblical miracles, meet Jesus’ disciples and other characters, and even battle Satan. It got a lot of people talking, either out of excitement or outrage, but apart from some pre-rendered content and a short teaser, we didn’t get anything for the next three years. Well, the wait is over, thanks to a playable prologue of I Am Jesus that recently became available on Steam.

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METEOR BLASTER is a mobile space shooting video game designed to gauge users’ field of vision and help detect glaucoma, a serious condition that can lead to blindness.

Scientists at Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine teamed up with Japanese television company Sendai Broadcasting Co., Ltd. to create a special video game that they say can help improve users’ vision. METEOR BLASTER doesn’t have some miraculous effect on their eyesight like these special myopia-curing eyeglasses, but it can detect early symptoms of glaucoma and thus help prevent potential blindness. And all you need to do is play it for at least five minutes.

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A Connecticut mother was shocked to find that her 6-year-old boy used her credit card to spend a small fortune on his favorite smartphone game over a couple of months.

In July of this year, Jessica Johnson, a real-estate broker from Wilton, Connecticut, discovered that substantial sums of money were being deducted from her Chase account by Apple and PayPal. Thinking it was a mistake or fraud, the 41-year-old mother-of-one called the bank and ended up filing a fraud claim in July. By that time, her suspicious credit card charges had reached  a whopping $16,293.10, but it wasn’t until October that her bank told her that the charges were legit and she needed to contact Apple.

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A Japanese self-described “nerd” has been playing Nintendo’s Ring Fit Adventure for the Switch for over six months, and he claims it helped him go from overweight to impressively chiseled.

“This is the result of a nerd doing Ring Fit for half a year,” Japanese Twitter user ‘kzm’ posted, along with a picture of his toned torso. The post got a lot of attention back in late July, getting almost 24,000 retweets and nearly 400 comments, mostly from people congratulating him on his resolve. Apparently, kzm has been playing Ring Fit Adventure every day since November of last year, and relied on it to keep himself in shape during the Covid-19 lockdown. Only it helped him do much more than that, as a photo of him from November 2019 shows him looking overweight, at least compared to his new sculpted physique.

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A Taiwanese pensioner who once made international headlines for strapping almost a dozen smartphones to his bicycle so he could catch multiple Pokemon in Pokemon GO! faster has now taken his passion for the mobile game to new heights, with a whopping 64 phones attached to his bike.

We originally featured Chen Sanyuan in August of 2018, shortly after photos of him taken by passers-by in Taipei City had gone viral. It was easy to see why photos of the then 70-year-old were getting so much attention – here was this old man riding his bicycle around town with multiple smartphones hooked on to the handlebars. After  reaching the front page of Reddit, Chen was approached by Taiwanese gaming website EXP.GG and he explained that he had come up with the bizarre setup so he could operate multiple Pokemon GO accounts at the same time. He had fallen in love with Niantic’s hit game after being introduced to it by his grandson, and now couldn’t get enough.

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A Chinese family recently sued Chinese gaming giant Tencent after their two children were left fighting for their lives a after jumping off of a building to see if they would come back to life like their favorite video game characters.

The two siblings, aged 11 and 9, reportedly became addicted to popular video games Mini World and Game of Peace during the lockdown caused by the spread of the SarsCov-2 virus. Their parents had bought them a smartphone, and they would spend up to eight hours a day playing the two mobile games at the family home in Handan, China. On March 22, the two children jumped off of the family’s 50-foot-tall residential building to see if they would come back to life, just like their video game avatars. The pair were critically injured, breaking numerous bones, and required several surgical procedures.

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This is the story of a middle-aged woman from the UK who decided to end her unhappy marriage to pursue a fairy-tale romance in an online video game which ultimately resulted in a real-life wedding.

Kelly Sexton was 37 when she first started playing Second Life, an online simulation game where players customize their avatars and live out their fantasies. She was suffering from fibromyalgia, ME and non-epileptic attack disorder (NEAD), and Second Life proved a welcome escape from the troubles of daily life. She was married at the time and had four children, so she never really considered the idea of falling in love with a stranger and starting a new life, albeit an online one. But that’s exactly what happened.

On New Years Eve 2016, Kelly’s avatar, Selena, was approached by a tall, dark-haired, buff male avatar who started pole dancing in front of her. She found it very funny, so she started flirting with him.

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A viral Facebook post by a regular kid from the Philippines may prove to be one of the most effective marketing pushes for Nintendo’s new RingFit Adventure, a video games designed to get players moving rather than sit for hours.

Migui Gabriel, a young graphic artist from Pasig City, in the Philippines, recently took to Facebook to praise Nintendo’s RingFit Adventure video game for helping him lose about 9 kilograms (20 pounds) in 30 days. On January 4, he posted a short message, as well as before-and-after photos of himself, to show everyone that the transformation was in fact real. And all he allegedly had to do was play Nintendo’s  exercising action-RPG game for 25 minutes every day, although he admits cutting down on carbs and not eating after 7 pm probably helped too. Still, he says the game was key, as this wasn’t his first attempt at losing weight.

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An upcoming video game has been raising eyebrows due to its unusual premise – putting players in the shoes of Jesus Christ and having them perform biblical feats like multiplying fish, healing others and calming stormy seas.

Aptly named “I Am Jesus Christ” the upcoming video game from developer PlayWay is a realistic simulator game inspired by stories from the New Testament, from His baptizing in the Jordan River, to His resurrection after being nailed to the cross. In a recently revealed trailer we see Jesus healing a blind woman (Matthew 21:14), producing fish out of thin air for a hungry fisherman (John 6:35), and walking on water to save a ship caught in a storm (Mark 4:41). All these feats apparently deplete a bar that apparently correlates to Jesus’ holy abilities.

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In a time when parents around the world are becoming increasingly concerned about how much time their children are spending in front of the computer screen playing popular video games like Fortnite, one Canadian father is sparking controversy for supporting his son’s eSports career, going as far as pulling him out of school so he could dedicate more time to video games.

Dave Herzog, a 49-year-old entrepreneur from Sudbury, Canada, has been “breeding” his son, Jordan, for an eSports career for over a decade. A longtime gamer himself, Dave claims that he put a gaming controller in his son’s hands when he was just three years old, and it didn’t take long for him to show that he had a true gift for gaming. By age 7, he was already a skilled Halo player, and at age 10 he was already dominating local gamers that Dave himself had put him in contact with. But it was when Jordan won his first Halo tournament, which earned him $2,000 worth of gaming apparel, that Dave Herzog realized his son could make a career out of it.

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A viral video of a Filipino mother who goes to an internet cafe and hand-feeds her 13-year old son because he refuses to end his 48-hour gaming binge to eat has once again reignited the debate on youth video game addiction.

37-year-old Lilybeth Marvel first noticed there was something wrong with her son Carlito about two years ago, when he began staying up late at an internet cafe near the family home in Nueva Ecija, the Philippines. Things got progressively worse as time went by, to the point where the 13-year-old now spends days on end with his eyes glued to a monitor playing his favorite “battle royale” video game, Rules of Survival. Last week, Mrs. Marvel was filmed delivering her son’s breakfast to the internet cafe and hand feeding him while he continued to play, because he had been there for over 48 hours.

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Follow JC Go! is a religious take on the popular mobile game Pokemon Go. Instead of using augmented reality to roam around in the real world and catch virtual Pokemon, you get to catch saints and other religious figures.

Developed by Fundación Ramón Pané, a Catholic organization with headquarters in Miami and Honduras, Follow JC Go! is an augmented reality video game that combines technology and evangelization to teach players of all ages about the Catholic faith. It features the same principles as the immensely popular Pokemon GO app, allowing users to roam around real-life locations and use the camera of their smartphones to find and catch virtual characters. Only instead of Pokemon like the adorable Pikachu, players will be looking for saints and other religious figures.

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