by Julie A. Wein

Created on: November 04, 2010   Last Updated: November 06, 2010

Newsweek recently named Farmville the most addictive game on Facebook. But how addicted to a game do you have to be to shake your own child to death because he or she had the nerve to interrupt your game playing?  Ask Florida mom Alexandra Tobias. This is the fate her baby boy met when he began to cry while she was playing the game.

The 22 year old confessed to police that she shook her baby, smoked a cigarette in an attempt to calm down, and proceeded to shake him again. She told officials that she lost her temper because she was trying to concentrate on Farmville, and the baby broke her concentration. It has been reported that the baby may have been hit in the head while she was shaking him.

When her son stopped breathing, Tobias called 911. Baby Dylan was rushed to the hospital suffering from a broken leg and head injuries. The official cause of the baby’s death was head trauma stemming from abuse.

Tobias pleaded guilty to second-degree murder charges in October of 2010. She will go on trial in December of 2010 and could be sentenced to 25-50 years in prison. Normally second-degree murder charges can carry a sentence of life in prison, but according to Florida state guidelines Tobias may get a lighter sentence.

Farmville is reportedly such an addictive game that some of its players have gone into massive debt and even lost jobs over it. Time magazine named Farmville one of the “worst inventions,” of the past few decades.

While Facebook’s many games are fun, to get so caught up in a game that a person can abuse their own child to the point of death is absolutely sickening. No game is more important than another human being’s life, no matter how fun or addictive the game is. As with anything else on the Internet, gaming can be a healthy pastime to indulge in or it can be destructive. Clearly in the case of Alexandra Tobias it was more than destructive, it was deadly.

Anyone finding himself or herself having an unhealthy obsession with a computer game needs counseling, so incidents like this do not happen in the future. There is help out their for addicts, regardless of what their addiction is. It can be easy to cross the line from a fun hobby to a destructive or even deadly one.

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