Man dead after online gaming binge?

I saw this article in the Toronto Star today, which claims that a man in China died after three straight days of compulsive gambling:

A man in southern China appears to have died of exhaustion after a three-day Internet gaming binge, state media said Monday.

The 30-year-old man fainted at a cybercafe in the city of Guangzhou on Saturday afternoon after he ha been playing games online for three days, the Beijing News reported.

Paramedics tried to revive him but failed and he was declared dead at the cafe, it said. The paper said that he may have died from exhaustion brought on by too many hours on the Internet.

I am pretty gullible, but not even I will buy this story. Three days of gambling and then death? Um ... I don't think so.

This is either a case of government propaganda aimed at deterring Internet usage and gambling among the Chinese, or the man died of causes (e.g., drugs) to which the government would rather not admit.

Okay, I know the latter option sounds a little conspiracy theory-ish, but when I first moved to South Korea, I was replacing a Canadian teacher named Geoff. According to his former co-workers (my co-workers at the time), Geoff used drugs quite regularly. Just a couple of weeks after Geoff had moved to Seoul for new opportunities, his body was found. The westerners who knew him figured he had died of a drug overdose. But apparently - and I admit I have no way of proving this - the cause of death was attributed to the fan in his room, which supposedly pushed out all the oxygen and caused his suffocation. If you lived there at the time, you would understand just how much was (is?) sometimes kept "hush-hush".

"Death by fan" sounds just as plausible as a man neglecting his own survival needs for three straight days in order to gamble, doesn't it?