One has to wonder what unique and seriously crazy set of circumstances allow the beginning of “trends” for games of chance with serious danger of injury, maiming, and in some cases even death.
Has our world become too boring? Are the traditional games of chance and adrenaline producing sports too complicated, expensive, or boring for the youth?
How can the idea of setting oneself alight as part of a dare and a game be a good idea in any way, shape or form.
Our grandparents used to tell us to choose to be a good example rather than a cautionary tale in our daily lives, clearly many youngsters today did not get that message.
Has the internet and the videos of sometimes silly and many times downright stupid activities, as well as the images of war, cruelty and suffering, perhaps desensitised us as humans and the youth in particular to the point where they have to reach higher and higher into the stratosphere of craziness and depths of despair to get any reaction at all?
ER24 in a press release this week said : “People are screaming of pain and its a direct result of people taking part in the fire-challenge, a dare game that has gone viral on social media where the participants voluntarily set themselves alight by applying flammable liquids such as rubbing alcohol onto their body and filming the outcome.”
As far as can be determined, one of the first fire-challenge videos were uploaded in April 2012 onto YouTube. In the video a young man sets his chest hair alight. ER24 reports since that initial video's upload it has had more than one hundred thousand views.
It appears that in April 2013 a Vine user introduced the hash tag fire-challenge and it accompanied videos of users setting themselves alight. The challenge is to set yourself alight and extinguish the flames as fast as you can; however it rarely has a desirable outcome. ER24 reports its members have watched almost a hundred videos on the Internet on this so-called fire-challenge and none of them were without injury, pain or even death. In Buffalo New York a fifteen-year-old boy died after participating in the fire-challenge game. Reported in an online newspaper on the 24th of July this year he doused himself with alcohol and was set ablaze by his friends.
Apparently he was not near any water source and could not stop the fire quick enough and sustained serious burn wounds.
Even getting into water quickly can still leave serious burn wounds and inhalation burns can lead to suffocation.
The trend to post challenges on various social media sites and other users are soon to follow, some of them ending in death, is gaining momentum worldwide.
Challenges like the neknomination where you had to down an alcohol beverage and so forth also had its fair share of victims. The challenges affect not only children, but adults as well. However, children are more susceptible to these challenges to establish a point of hierarchy within their friends’ circle.
Those who grew up in the 70s and 80s might remember the dangerous game called chicken where you had to stand in front of oncoming traffic or on a train track and the person who “chickened out” last was the winner.
The popular 80s movie Footloose, recently revived on Durban's stage as a musical show, even included a reference to the game where the female lead stood on train tracks facing an oncoming train, in another part of the 80s movie she stands with her legs on two different cars racing towards a truck.
The choking game, which was popular in the early 90s, is still popular amongst many teens, although not always identified in time and correctly. Teens would strangulate each other to the point where they pass out or get the feeling of being high. Some will go as far to tie a belt or a rope around their neck and hang themselves from a door handle or bedpost.
Many have died because of this so-called game.
