Immersion of Video Games: Harmless or Dangerous?

After our lecture on immersion I tried to think about all the games that I've become totally immersed in, and it wasn't very hard. There were periods in my life where I would play a game for 10 hours straight, then sleep for 10 hours straight all whilst dreaming about the game, recreating specific moments/strategies for games from scratch all within my dream scape. If that's not intradiegetic immersion then I don't know what is! However, that was the limit to my experience with immersion and video games, I know for other hardcore gamers the immersion can take on a whole new, sinister level. I think back to the South Korean man who died from neglecting to eat for 6 days whilst playing WoW or another man who died from smoke inhalation during a fire in his apartment complex whilst being immersed in a computer game. Therefore immersion within video games can at times be a wonderful (if draining) experience for some users, it can obviously effect some users to a dangerous degree. Knowing this, it is apparent that the various types of immersion within video games is an important issue to address in an academic light.