No, stupid fucking parents sue game companies when their children die because they're genetically inferior. Sorry for your loss, ladly, but if it wasn't a video game, it would have been, I don't know, one of the other 18-fucking-billion electronic devices in the world. Be glad he didn't suffer, and shut the fuck up. The disclaimer should be clue enough that you're going to lose this, unless our judicial system is even more worthless than I thought.
I'd argue that 'severe and permanent disabling injuries that will affect him "in all activities of daily living" and necessitate lifelong medical expenses' kind of counts as suffering.
All that aside, I'll play devil's advocate for a second. My true thoughts on this are a bit mixed, but I'm going to be a jackass.
There is a very high probability that this instance of PSE was the first time it has occured in this child. You usually don't know if a child has a form of epilepsy (or is susceptible to external stimuli causing seizures) until their first episode unless by chance there is a cat scan going on that happens to pick up some unusual activity. As you can imagine, the chances of that for an otherwise healthy child is slim to none. Epilepsy isn't neccesarily easy to diagnose, and in the case of a grand mal seizure, a lot of damage can be done with a single episode. This very well might not be a case of reading the fucking manual, this could very well be a case where the parent holds no blame at all.
Does that mean she should sue? I don't know. There certainly are ways to greatly decrease the chances of inducing PSE. Many television regulating bodies also regulate certain types of flickers and don't allow them to air. Likewise, certain frequencies of flickering for all public lighting displays are regulated in many places to avoid triggering PSE in people (both knowingly epileptic and not) - this includes signboards, neon lights, strobe lights, and pretty much everything you can think of. I'm fairly certain it's also usually followed in web design to avoid graphics flickering at a certain rate and I've come at least one site that had a popup click open warning that there was a dangerous frequency of flickering ahead and to hit a button to skip it or whatever.
I'm not an expert - I don't know how much we actually know about PSE, but I'd say there's a chance we know enough to be able to prevent inducing it in sensitive people most of the time. If that's the case then you could probably succesfully argue that companies would have a moral obligation to take measures to try and prevent it...if that's the case.
Think about it, all of a sudden your kid is in a somewhat crippled state - physically, mentally, or both - and it's through no fault of your own. You're faced with huge medical bills , possibly substandard or non existent medical insurance, and a child who may never be self-sustainable. I'm not one who would personally sue in a case like the one Scott mentioned, but that's a person and you may be ruining their life. Corporations are a completely different story by design. Weigh it in your mind as a parent - take a chance and try to sue to ensure your child the comfort and medical care that the money can provide, or just suck it up as an act of God and sleep well at night knowing that you didn't cost the shareholders a few pennies. Not all lawsuits are about greed, some are about necessity.
