One more family suffer due to online game….

Police in Pakistan’s Punjab province’s capital, Lahore, claimed on Friday that a 14-year-old boy killed his whole family, including his mother and two little sisters, while “under the influence” of the online game PUBG.

Last week, Nahid Mubarak, a 45-year-old health worker, was discovered dead in Lahore’s Kahna neighborhood alongside her 22-year-old son Taimur and two daughters aged 17 and 11. According to investigators, her adolescent son, who was unharmed and is the family’s sole survivor, turned out to be the killer.

A senior police officer told Dawn that Ali had confessed to his crime. The suspect was a diehard PubG player and used to spend most of his time in his room playing the online game.

He said the teenage boy had turned aggressive after failing to achieve the given targets in the game.

On the day of the incident, the officer said, the boy “lost his senses” after he missed a target after playing the game for hours, got hold of his mother’s pistol, and went to her room where she was asleep along with her other children.

Ali allegedly shot at and killed his mother and then fired at two of his siblings. When his elder brother entered the room after hearing gunshots, Ali opened fire on him too, killing all of them on the spot, the officer explained. He then went to his room on the upper storey, got some rest and then left the house.

Ali threw the pistol in a nearby drain and returned to his room to pretend he was asleep when the incident took place. Police investigators had doubts about the boy’s role since the incident took place due to his confusing body language, but they decided to observe him for a few days, the officer said.

During that time, police completed the inquiry to explore all possible options but found nothing more. On Thursday, the officer said, police finally detained Ali on suspicions of committing familicide.

If we talk about India, Many Cyber experts and Cyber influencers raising voices for online games….. but there is not any positive result online gaming has brought with it a slew of new challenges and risks that include exposure of children to inappropriate content, cyberbullying, sexual exploitation, addiction gambling, and toxic peers.

The global gaming industry is expected to grow in the next few years, and the risks associated with it, such as cybercrimes and cyberbullying, must be acknowledged by parents, gamers, and the government, said the report by CyberPeace Foundation, a think tank and grassroots NGO of cyber security and policy experts.

Online gaming also exposes children to sexual predators and serves as a “gateway drug” into online pornography, said the report titled, “Online Gaming- Issues, Challenges And Recommendations For End-Users, Parents and Government Regulations