This kind of situation is unavoidable. It is commonplace for children to die due to neglect of care, but this article only gets media attention because there was a game involved. I don't play games much and I don't particularly like Sims or any online virtual life games for that matter, but the fact remains that this is a problem with the minds of the people involved, not the game. I don't see any signs of mental problems from my perspective, but the major problem here seems to be ignorance. I doubt that couple had any idea what they were doing or that their baby was suffering malnutrition. What they did may not be excusable, but I have personal doubts about the way that article is worded, the article specifically focuses on the idea that the couple was obsessed with their virtual-child more so than their real child, but provides us with no derivatives from which they decided upon this at all, which seems, to me, like blatant sensationalism. I even have serious doubts that such described 12-hour sessions took place at all. The whole article touches on too many hot subjects for writer not to get over enthusiastic about.

You can see this in two ways. Either A)

The couple didn't care about their child and used the game as an escape from reality to a perfect world leading to the death of their own child.

or B)

The couple were ignorant of how to take care of a child that just survived a premature birth, which led to it's death and a recent game addiction was mostly uninvolved in doing what ignorance wasn't already.