From the Detroit Free Press by way of MSNBC is running a story that Joel Zumaya, the relief pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, missed three games of the American League Championship Series due to a Guitar Hero related injury.

I've heard of missing work because someone was up all night playing WoW, but this takes it to an all new level. What is your worst/best story about games interrupting your life?

Which story should I tell? So many to choose from.

I don't think I've ever been injured physically due to video games (aside from some carpal tunnel), but I guess you could say that EQlive was a serious interruption for me. I doubt an explanation is needed :)

Though I never experienced it, there is of course the "Space Invaders' Wrist" injury.

sorta game related, I nearly took out my eye with a Roland MT-32...crawling around under my desk to find why something had come unplugged I accidentally pulled on the audio cable causing the thing to fall and take out a sizeable chunk of skin from my forehead...an inch lower and my eye would have been in trouble! Was kinda embarrasing at work the next day having to explain to everyone that I accidentally dropped a sound module on myself...

I badly twisted my ankle playing half life on the PS2. I was so engrossed in the game that i was laying on the bottom of my leg for a good hour. My mobile phone (cell phone) rang and i jumped up to get it but because i couldn't feel my foot i put it down at a weird angle and all i heard was a crunch. It took a good 5 minutes for the blood to get back and when it did it was agony. I had a couple of days off work as i couldn't stand for very long on it.

i also scalded my leg with a cup off coffee as i was playing gta 3 and laying on my side and half of my hand was numb i went to pick up the cup and it just fell out of my hand. Though this wasn't grounds for time off work.

My advice is move around every 30 minutes or so so you don't get numb limbs

Lol. The nice thing about a computer is that I can sit in a nice, comfortable chair and lean back with my feet up and I'm never cutting off circulation.

The only time I ever got an injury is when I play Guitar Hero as well, though not to an extreme extent. My fingers cramp up from holding the guitar in the same position for so long. I eventually have to stop. crack my fingers, and move them around.

I sometimes get other hand related injuries from playing too long.

Otherwise, not much else.

Video games have countlessly interrupted my life, work schedule, sleep schedule as well as other parts of my life. But in a major sense, video games have never majorly had a big effect like taking days off from school or handing in a project late. Its all about self-control. Video games are important, but my school-work and my future is more so.

My advice is move around every 30 minutes or so so you don't get numb limbs

Doing the dance depicted by your avatar helps also, I'm sure. Very stimulating to the circulation. (Mine, not so much.)

Well, the only injury I got from games was back in the middle 80's, playing Activision Decathlon on the Atari 2600. The joystick's plastic cover was off, with just the white plastic stick left. One night I played so much that I got a bubble at the palm of my right hand.

LOL I remember that game, it just flat out hurt making the athlete run.

You didn't play it properly if you didn't get blisters, especially if you had Atari 2600. Ouch.

Lol, I remember the time I played Eye Toy Kinetic, I finished on Hospital. I almost fracture one foot finger after jump and land on a forged iron desk, I will not talk about how finished my elbow and hip after this accident ^_^

In Spanish the English word Eye, sounds like the pain expression ¡Ay!, so we suspect this is a kind or irony...

In Spanish the English word Eye, sounds like the pain expression ¡Ay!, so we suspect this is a kind or irony...

I never thought about that. Must sound strange to you then, huh?

I still suffer from what I call "Nintendo thumb" on my left hand. It's either from being to aggressive with the D-pad or bad design with the controllers. Blisters on the fingers are still quite common too.

I can see it now, gamers in a few years suing Nintendo, Sega, Atari...(or whoevers still about), because of their arthritic hands and twisted joints brought on by badly designed controllers in the 70s and 80s.

I've found the Playstation D-pads to be especially good at giving one calluses. The one piece D-pads (Nintendo, Sega, Microsoft, etc...), all seem like heaven by comparison, if you're into 2D fighting games. At least that's how it is with me.

Yes, it's the recession in the middle of the D-pad that causes too much friction on the thumb.

I developed thumb blisters several times from NES when I was a kid, but the most impressive I saw was my brother. He had been playing some stick-spinnign game and was spinnign with his palm because it was faster, I think it was a Mario Party. He wore a hole through his palm and started bleeding all over, so wrapped it in a Kleenex and kept playing.

Mario Party will absolutely kill your analog stick, and your palm. I cant tell you how many times I've had to throw out my controllers over that game. More than one I can assure you.

I've had bad palm injuries from that game, but I don't exactly remember bleeding at all. o.O

er I second the Mario Party palm injury as well as the old NES hard edge-itis. In regards to the Mario Party Palm, I remember Nintendo coming out with a glove for it.

I'd forgotten how sharp the edges on NES buttons were until I'd come across some Doc's pad repair kits and slapped in the new rubber contacts and buttons. Yikes! I nearly put the old buttons in there with the new contacts after that.

I got blisters early on when I got my NES. It wasn't a problem again until Street Fighter II hit the SNES.

The closest I've come to real injury were with some of the more physical games. We'd done a road trip to Branson and before heading home, we stopped at a go-kart track. Their arcade featured Sonic Blastman, which unlike the SNES "conversion", wasn't a beat-em-up. It had a punching target and a glove, and the onscreen action was what was used as bonus stages on the SNES. You hit the target and the harder you hit it, the more damage and points racked up. Let's just say that the target didn't have much give to it and I tweaked my wrist a bit.

A few years back, I'd done a double whammy at an arcade that featured Konami's motion-sensing games, one a police-themed light gun game and the other a boxing title with weighted rubber gauntlets. The police game senses your movements and translates them onscreen to dodging enemy fire and ducking behind cover and the boxing game turns it into dodges and punches. I'm a little out of shape anyway, and I've got a bum knee. Needless to say, you'd think I'd just tried running a marathon. I'd worn myself out on Top Skater in the past, but that was nothing.