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S. Korea's Stress-Driven Online Gaming Addiction
techsoldaten writes "The Washington Post is running an article about the ever-increasing problem of videogame addiction in South Korea. From the article: 'The situation has grown so acute that 10 South Koreans -- mostly teenagers and people in their twenties -- died in 2005 from game addiction-related causes, up from only two known deaths from 2001 to 2004, according to government officials.'"
Or is it the constant smoke inhalation?
We require more LAN parties.
I hate the idea of regulating games, but smart adults should know what these games do to your health. I played WoW for a long time when stress in the real world shoved my ego the wrong way. I stopped fairly recently and resolved my real life problems. Then I realized that I had stopped exercising. I used to run 5 miles a day and lift weights 3 times a week. I'm now about 40 pounds heavier, my muscular strength is about 1/2 what it used to be, and my running endurance is greatly diminished - about 1/5th what it used to be. I'm not blaming WoW per se, but just warning everyone - when I was in the game I had no idea what I was doing to myself. Don't let it bite you in the ass too.
Is Jack Thompson not doing enough recently to demonize games?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Is it wrong that I'm reading this topic while waiting to be respawned in Counter Strike?
Just TEN PEOPLE died?
Sorry guys, not that significant. How many people die every year due to any sort of drug related addiction?
A hell of a lot more.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
When American gamers were asked to comment about their South Korean counterparts, 86% responded "gogo = boot"
The last 14% just said "no gooks ffa snipers r0xor teh n00bs kekeke k thx~~"
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
You need to get a job and a girlfriend and move out of my basement!!
Signed,
Mrs. Korea
This item appeared earlier here. I don't have the exact URL to it though....
For those 'afflicted', they see it as the only means of escape from a stress-filled, dead end life into a world where they have the power to do just about anything. For a handfull of people, that is all they have to live for hence their marathon gaming sessions and (sometimes unfortunately) subsequent death.
If society at large wasn't so materialistic and cash-driven (gotta make a buck no matter what the cost), the stress levels would go down dramatically so people wouldn't do marathon gaming anymore as a means of escape from their 'pitiful' lives. Perhaps they could do 'great things' that would benifit society worldwide as a whole without the relentless pressure to 'grab cash' along the way just to stay alive....
In the meantime far more people get injured playing or by fights or even killed over their constant passion for Monday Night Football and yet we see no articles about it because "oh that's normal..." It's just more of the "us vs. those weirdos" mentality.
Individuality and inspiration are grossly undervalued resources in many Asian cultures. So is reason, but it's not as obvious.
I am sure that more than 2 people died from gaming related causes in that time period. The medical community just wasn't yet aware of the effects of non-stop gaming. I am an EMT, but if someone dies of a blood clot, the cause of death will not be listed as "LAN Party," it will be listed as "Pulmonary embolism."
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
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One form is simply that a game player likes the computer game.
The player might spend hours on playing the game. A good example
of an absorbing game is Netrek of the early
1990s. Many geeks at UC-Berkeley spent hours on playing this
game instead of working on their Ph.D. dissertations.
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Another form is a means to escape an abusive household. The article
at the "Washington Post" states, "'I can understand my son's suffering,'
she said. ' He could never satisfy his father and was failing at school.
But when he plays his games, he becomes an undefeatable warrior.'"
When parents physically or emotionally brutalize their children,
the victims try to flee to safety. In a Western nation, most people
oppose child abuse and would offer to help the victims of abuse.
The first form of addiction is probably acceptable, but the second form of addiction is not. The second form is a terrible cry for help.In Korea, the story is quite different. In Korea, you would consider someone with different blood to be inferior and to be not worthy of your help. The overwhelming majority of adopted Korean orphans are adopted by Westerners. The typical Korean could not care less about orphans -- or abused children. In this kind of cold, brutal environment, an abused child has nowhere to run. So, the child escapes into on-line gaming: a fantasy world where the abused child can have the wonderful childhood that he cannot have in real life.
The problem with video games is they are excellent "success simulators". That feeling of self worth, even if artificial, is very satisfying. Throw in another condition such as OCD and you end up with people selfdestructing online.
At last, someone who knows what they're talking about.
FTA:
"Game addiction has become one of our newest societal ills," said Son Yeongi, president of the Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity, which offers government-funded counseling. "Gaming itself is not the problem. Like anything, this is about excessive use."
And later:
"There is nothing wrong with kids relieving stress through games," Chin said. "But parents need to watch for the warning signs of addiction. If a child gets violent when told to stop playing a game, that's one of the first indications that there's a problem."
It's refreshing to see a take on this which doesn't involve video games being the spawn of the devil.
Mr. Period: Nine is the one that's right by ten!
Nine: One day I will kill him. Then, I will be Ten.
I'd hate for my last words to be:
"kekekeke zerg rush ^___^"
People generally want to be respected and liked by their peers. And "in a materialistic society", part of the way people are judged is material wealth. It's hard to decide to not be materialistic when that means people you know will look down on you.
Yes, it's definitely an individual problem, not "just" a societal one - if you pick your friends right, you'll know people that won't think less of you because of your house size. But the more materialistic societies make it that much harder - the same people that would be able to resist in one culture would collapse and go with the crowd in a different one.
0.000000153% of the total world's population.
10/48,422,644
0.000020651% of the South Korean population.
So, yes, compared to the total deaths in S. Korea from cancer (~65,000 in 2004) or suicide (~12,000 in 2004) [source] I would say it is rather insignificant.
I mean, "every day, 37 Korean children under the age of 14 are killed or injured as pedestrians in road traffic accidents." [source] These people were playing video games too much.
I, personally, am astonished that people can FORCE themselves to SIT until they DIE.
OK, serously, how the hell can you find something enjoyable for more then a few hours. I play games all the time; I even read Slashdot while flying in WoW, but I cannot play that game for more then 8 hours with out dying(in game) from lack of attention to my health bar. it just stops being fun after a while and becomes a chore. What do I do? I LOG OFF and DO SOMETHING ELSE! I can see being stuck longer then you want in a raid or something but not 50 hours. I'd be like you guys have wiped over and over for the past 12 hours... bye!
I don't claim to have a life, I sit around and play games all day, but I get up off my ass every few hours even if it's to roam aimlessly becuase I have to walk. i just don't understand how life could suck so much that you don't move for 50 hours. I guess life in S. Korea is allot crappier then here in the US.
If regenerating health takes so long a Gameboy may be a worthwile investment. Only problem I had with it was that the Gameboy game tends to become more interesting than the MMORPG and I forget to stand up and fight the next mob.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Once you get a taste of Online gaming you want more, but you need harder and harder stuff to fit your bill or you get bored and aggitatted with the gaming industry. With drugs, you just take more and you get your high. Online gaming is so new that there isn't enough to satisfy a hardcore gamer's addiction, so they turn to things like walking outside which renders more FPS than the best video card. ITs the less than hardcore gamers that give addicts a bad name. They play and play without realizing the game they're can be broken down into imbalances, paper rock scissor decisions, repetitiveness, or level capping. These addicts without vision are the one's at true risk. A regular hardcore gamer just isn't satisfied anymore. Can I get a,"I can't get no satisfaction" from the hardcore gaming crowd?
God spoke to me.
Except that something like that is going to piss people off and make them go play another game. I don't play World of Warcraft all that often any more, maybe once every other week, but when I do, it's usually for a number of hours. Just how I like to do things. I'll spend a Saturday playing and can be logged in for 6 straight hours. Now I'm not always at the console, I'll get up to go to the bathroom, get food, or just to stretch a bit, but I'll stay logged in the whole time (it is inconvenient and unnecessary to log out). If you start kicking me off I'll just get mad and sign up with someone else. Never mind that I could just go and play another game.
This whole nanny ideal where technology or the government needs to watch out for us in every little way is stupid. Yes, people are dumb, they do things to an excess. It is not the job of everyone else in the world to solve that problem via regulation because it doesn't do any good anyhow. You do not cure an addict through force, they can only cure themselves by choosing to.
The real answer is to understand what leads to game addiction, what the signs are, and for people who care about the addicts to confront them with their problem and help them through it. It's no different than alcohol addiction. Most people don't get addicted to alcohol, some do. The answer is not to ban alcohol.
Let's see... if 37 * 365 = 13505 per year outdoors in traffic, yet only 10 die indoors playing games, then games are 1350.5 times safer, right? A mere 10 is a figure to be celebrated.
You know, that sounds like just what pushed me towards programming.
For whatever other qualities my parents had, and much as they did give me some good education too, they had two problems:
1. Between them and grandma, I had exactly zero privacy.
It may sound like "wtf, he'll have privacy when he's on his own, not in _my_ house", but seriously, please don't do that to your kid. Even the most affectionate cat needs its moments when it's alone.
It's not even just that _they_ were with me all the time (I couldn't even just go to a freaking summer camp, one of them had to come there to keep keeping an eye on me), the worst was that they told everyone every single detail I ever did. It's a freaking nightmare to live with your whole life posted on a public billboard, so to speak. Virtually _noone_ is _that_ extroverted. It gives everyone in town control over your life: e.g., you can't tell your friends "sorry, can't come now, I haven't finished homework" when you know they already know, or will find out, exactly at which hour you were already done with your homework. Or not without quickly losing every single friend you ever had.
Or to give an example that's still traumatic to think about, I had a girlfriend at some point in high school (yes, I wasn't that nerdy) which pretty quickly got addicted to my computer. Well, fairy 'nuff, I'm not even opposed to sharing the computer, but let's at least try to do something else too. So I pull a "let's go out today, mom doesn't let me use the computer today." (Right, I'm losing all nerd credibility here;) Mom actually called her to tell her that's not true. That was one relationship that went down hill very fast thereafter.
2. Their approach to "rewarding" any personal initiative was, well, best illustrated by Mac Hall Comics. (It's just a comic and safe for work.) Just about everything I did was most likely to be met with, literally, "*sigh* Who the hell told you to do that?" or "*sigh* Who the hell told you to do it like that?" It was as good as a slap in the face, let me tell you.
You get the idea.
Thing is, programming was something that side-stepped both issues and put _me_ in control. Finally. Bloody finally.
Now they're both programmers and perfectly capable of understanding what I did there, but:
A) Anyone they _could_ tell stuff like "our little Moraelin used a goto instead of a loop today" (and have any hope they'd understand that) was usually way outside the circle of people I was in. Which was as good as having some privacy for a change.
B) They were actually pretty easy to satisfy in that domain. I suppose that when a kid writes machine code and it works, it's pretty hard to pull a "*sigh* Who the hell told you to do it like that?" (And I really mean machine code: the 1K RAM in a ZX-81 wasn't enough for an assembler, so I had to convert it to hex by hand.) If nothing else, it works.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
As I sit here I am in my 3rd treatment center for heroin. However, I also was an Everquest addict when I was in high school. In my personal experience, they have had some interesting parallels and interesting differences. I'm going to spell out some of the differences, as I feel that this problem isn't being taken seriously enough. This is just my personal experiences, and in no way does it describe everyone.
-Isolation as a result of everquesting all day was even more severe than my worst run on heroin. Heroin alienated my friends, but when I was everquesting, I didn't have any friends to go back to because they were all online. Heroin could be combined with school, and even if it suffered, I was still making it to my classes mids and finals. Everquest/rpgs and school are mutually exclusive - You are either doing one or the other. If you are gaming all day, that is ALL you are doing.
-Self delusional thoughts on heroin and while playing everquest seemed to be similar in ways. In both worlds you feel like you are the master of your universe. The problem is, that feeling gets so strong, both things seemed to be better than experiencing actual life. A fantasy world was way more enjoyable at the time in both cases.
-Health - Now these two were almost exactly the same. Heroin doesn't "damage" your body (except in cases of overdose), so the health concerns are from personal neglect. In both cases, I would stop showering, brushing teeth, eating as little as I could to stay alive.
I was an everquest addict before I ever tried drugs. I finally quit playing before college after seeing friends fail out because of everquest. When I finally tried hard drugs (ie opiates), it seemed like I feel right into it at once, I had a learned behavior with addiction. I used to joke when I started heroin that smack wasnt as bad as eversmack. I don't have the answers though, I just wanted to demonstrate any kind of addiction is bad.
Hope this is insightful.
So download an alarm mod. There's plenty of mods out there that use the ingame clock (it has one) to do things like buzz you after a certian amount of time. Of course it shouldn't be necessary. Just listen to your body. If you are thirsty, get a drink, if you are stiff, stretch, etc. You shouldn't need a reminder for that, your body lets you know.