BBC article.
South Korean children face gaming curfew
Online gaming is hugely popular in South Korea.
The South Korean government is introducing policies aimed at curbing the amount of time children spend playing online games.
The first involves barring online gaming access to young people of school age between 12am (midnight) and 8am.
The other policy suggests slowing down people's internet connections after they have been logged on to certain games for a long period of time.
The Culture Ministry is calling on games providers to implement the plans.
It is asking the companies to monitor the national identity numbers of their players, which includes the age of the individual.
Parents can also choose to be notified if their identity number is used online.
"The policy provides a way for parents to supervise their children's game playing," Lee Young-ah from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism told Reuters.
The Korea Herald reports that Barameui Nara, Maple Story and Mabinogi, three popular virtual worlds, will introduce the blackout later this year.
Meanwhile role playing games "Dungeon and Fighter" and "Dragon Nest" will pilot the connection slowing scheme.
A total of 19 role playing games will eventually be included - a huge proportion of the online gaming market in the country.
South Korea has sophisticated high speed broadband connections and online gaming is enormously popular.
But there has been growing concern over the amount of time its citizens spend in virtual worlds and playing online games.
A couple whose baby daughter starved while they spent up to 12 hours a day in internet cafes raising a virtual child online have made headlines around the world.
They were charged with negligent homicide and are due to be sentenced on 16 April.
Online gaming is a big problem in South Korea, and apparently in some other Asian countries as well. But specifically South Korea. And they're acknowledging it and trying to do something about it. I can only speak from my very specific and very strange experience with MMOs, which I do not play myself, and net cafes. And that experience is that when combined they can ruin lives.
It may seem odd that the South Korean government is relying on the companies themselves to police their players, but MMOs don't work quite the same way there as they do in the EU and North America. Asian MMOs are mostly run on cash shops, and the cash shops actually cater better to off-and-on players, selling items that will give you temporary power or exp boosts. So if you can limit a player's gaming time then it's just more reason for them to buy cash shops items that will help them make up for the loss.
I know at least on of the games in the article, Dungeon and Fighter, has a built in stamina system already, which prevents you from entering dungeons more than a set amount each day (though obviously the cash shop will let you get around this), and I've seen that done in at least one more Korean MMO. So obviously the developers know what's going on.
The relevance for the rest of the world is that, although not as severe as in South Korea, MMOs do rule some people's lives. Will other governments have to step in on this, or will companies head this warning call and accept some social responsibility for games that they specifically design to be as addictive as possible?
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The curfew is stupid. How in the hell are they going to enforce access to games? All it'd take is lying about the age of the player when you sign up, or having a parent pay for it (Which most children will do anyways.).
Nevermind that i'm sure someone industrious enough will find a way around this "blackout" they're proposing. It seems kind of easy to get around.
But I really have to applaud South Korea, they identified a problem, and figured out a solution for it. Honestly, outside of a weekend, a school-kid really has no business playing video games between midnight and 8am, hell, it's unhealthy.
When you consider a pubescent teen's body need's on average 9.5 hours of sleep a day, and melatonin production usually begins around 11pm, signaling bed-time anyway, this policy really does look like a good thing.
Heck, one can even make the argument that a policy like this, on a long enough timeline, will end up making South Korea a more prominent player in the global economy, as play time goes down it isn't a stretch to say their education system will begin to become more successful.
I gotta say, I agree with S. Korea's stance on the issue.
By that logic something is wrong with South Korea - a large percentage of the youth must have these "personalities prone to addiction".
From my little experience playing Korean games most of them require a Citizen ID which is akin to a Social security number to play.
So enforcing it isn't all that difficult.
I don't think this is a bad idea though it doesn't address the actual problem just a symptom of it. These kids will turn to other addictive behaviors.
Such as what?
They are right now playing games because playing games is ridiculously cheap with the current Internet infrastructure of the country.
It's not like once the government starts regulating games the kids will turn to drugs or something.
seriously 3 out of every 4 people there smoke
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Really?
yes
I'm not trying to make a point just everyone smokes a whole ton in korea
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
it is the starcraft sports channel
it is the major sports channel; they show it on all the subways
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
And yes, Korean pro gamers can join the Korean Air Force team during their mandatory service period (Air Force Aces), but they still don't get to play as much as a normal pro gamer and the Aces lose most of their matches. They've got like 1 or 2 players of note, and they're complete wildcards. Still, it's pretty good propaganda for the Korean defence forces.
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Just like they do with, you know, addictive substances.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Exactly. We may not understand this since we live in a vastly different culture, but even reading articles about S. Korea makes me go multiple times in every paragraph.
go to bed on time, South Korea!
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Hyperbole much?
But in any case, this sounds like more of a case of addressing symptoms and not causes. If different cultures have different reactions, the product isn't inherently XYZ (addictive, whatever).
Why is it hyperbole?
Do you really not understand why certain types of video games - such as those that are based on subscription models - are designed to be as addicting as possible?
Hell, the entire reward mechanisms for typical "quests" (bring me 10 bear asses) is a textbook case of how reward pathways can be stimulated regularly to cause behaviors to become habits through repetition.
Let's get this shit out of the way right now.
[citation needed]
That's incredibly simplistic thinking.
1) Addiction is a feedback loop, so addressing the symptoms does address the cause.
2) Cultural factors can exaggerate or mitigate the effects of biology. This shouldn't be a newsflash to anybody.
3) What does "inherently addictive" mean? Addiction involves the interaction of a human with something else; a drug, a slot machine, a game, another human's naughty bits. You can't take an intellectual scalpel and excise the "inherent" addictive properties of anything - a pile of cocaine without a brain to affect isn't any more "addictive" than a wavelength of light as the color "blue" without an animal retina to see it. Addiction has to be considered within a human context or else it's a meaningless concept.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I'm not going to disagree it is more addicting than sewing, but it's not addicting in the same way that most drugs are.
Cocaine causes a short-lived surge of available dopamine in the limbic system.
Gambling causes a short-lived surge of available dopamine in the limbic system.
Video games causes a short-lived surge of available dopamine in the limbic system.
Do you see a pattern here?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Well, to perhaps further expand my meaning, if something causes a major problem in a culture and a minor to no problem in another, there is likely a defect in said culture which causes said problem, and it's generally better to address that root cause than to regulate the symptoms, esp. when said regulations step on many toes that have no issues (slightly less of an issue with minors, but what about a hypothetical student who has 30 minutes of downtime before school in the morning after all appropriate preparations and studying and wants to hop on?).
And does stopping video games cause a potentially highly dangerous withdrawal effect, like say, alcohol's DT?
I'll be fine, just give me a minute, a man's got a limit, I can't get a life if my heart's not in it.
Probably because gaming is not a national sport here, and gamers aren't treated like celebrities.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Net cafes are a surprisingly horrible environments. I've been around with them, and even in my own city AFTER the boom and bust of the early 2000s they're corrosive. People live in them, hidden from the world. Sometimes their own families don't know where they are or what they're up to. In Koreatown it was even worse; they didn't earn the nickname Korean dungeons only for how poorly lit most of them are.
I'm sure there are some better articles on that subject, but I'd have to do some digging to find them.
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Honestly the more I hear about South Korea the more awesome it sounds. The place sounds like a nation of gamer nerds, having the general populace being into Starcraft rather than say, Football, is just too damn cool.
We, as gamers in the US, get so much shit and there it's normal. I kinda want to take a trip out there now.
This is far less relevant than it sounds.
Cocaine is addictive but does not cause serious somatic withdrawal symptoms.
Antiseizure medications (like Zonegran) cause serious somatic withdrawal symptoms, but are not addictive.
Most alcoholics are addicted for years before DT becomes an issue.
Consequently, the presence or lack thereof of DT or any similar somatic withdrawal symptom is not a criterion for the addictiveness of a drug.
Khat addiction is a problem in the middle east, but not in the US. Does that mean that khat is not addictive? Meth addiction is a much huger problem in the United States than in, say, the British Isles. Does that mean that meth is not addictive?
Hey, the culture having a problem is the culture addressing the problem. Nobody is afraid that South Korea is going to reach across the globe and smack WoW players in the US, are they?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I'm almost positive that at some point someone will suggest that it sets a dangerous precedent that censor-happy types in the US might try to copy. To which my reply would be that I don't see why the Koreans have an obligation to worry about what we might do.
Who knows, maybe they'll learn something about non-drug addiction that we can use to deal with some of the problems in the States.
I don't really understand, if it's so cut and dry, why doesn't everyone, or even a majority of people like MMO style games? Even people who play MMOs, most of the wow gamers aren't even level 80 - if people are simply robots responding to the stimuli of dopamine why is that?
Shouldn't everyone be max level and farming all the time who plays games? Why are so many gamers turned off by entire genres?
Drugs are actually fun though. Health consequences aside, I can't say I'd ever rather play WoW for a few hours every year on my birthday instead of do mushrooms.
I really think there's something of a social aspect that needs looking into, what other things do they do in Korea for fun? Do parents there not do what they do here and tell the kid to turn off the fucking TV and go outside?
My mom would rent me a console, or give me money and buy pizza, or go to Reno and take me with, giving me a couple hundred bucks to just eat shitty food and play games for 72 hours solid. But she'd also make me go the hell outside and do stuff with fellow human type creatures and interact with them face to face a lot of the time too.
A lot of families, here as well, do not have a living situation which gives them much control over how their children spend their free time.
You seem to think that I'm committing the same false dichotomy as everybody else.
The false dichotomy I'm referring to is the one implied by posts like this: "Games are not inherently harmful. People with personalities prone to addiction, or just people who can't concentrate on their own lives for whatever reason are the "problem", and that's a personal choice. The game isn't administering an addictive narcotic substance and forcing you to play."
False dichotomy: either activity X is addictive, or person Y is prone to addiction. 'It's not the game, it's the people!'
It doesn't work that way. Some activities are more addictive than others. Also, some people are more prone to addiction than others. These are not mutually incompatible statements, and in fact any discussion of addiction that tries to eliminate either the characteristics of the addicted brain or the characteristics of the addictive activity is doomed to incoherence.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
korea is awesome but these kinds of articles really exaggerate how big gaming is there. It's still not as popular as real sports, and the progaming is really a niche thing.