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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.'"
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."
It says in the article that most of the gamers die due to sitting in cramped positions for hours. Apparently it disrupts their blood circulation.
It seems to me that if they went out for smokes, a lot fewer gamers would be dying. At least in the short term.
We have a major lesson here: get up and take a walk every couple of hours.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
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....
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.
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.
I'm paralyzed from the waist down you insensitive clod!
I beg to differ. As a former alcohol/drug addict, online games have been a godsend. Yes, I am "addicted" to a game now, but I have used the MMORPG as a substitute for my previous addiction to drugs and alcohol. I may be somewhat antisocial by normal standards, but at least, now, my relationships to others are somewhat normal.
Before, I could not hold down a job, or maintain any sort of lasting relationship. My relationships with family members were severly strained.
Now, that I am a MMORPG addict, my relationships with my (most recent) girlfriend and family are excellent by comparison, and I have been able to hold down an excellent full time job for a year.
It is all a matter of perspective. There are many worse things in this world that a person could be doing with their spare time.
And, to be honest with you, how is spending 10 hours "gaming" any different than spending 10 hours reading fiction, or watching TV? They are all "wastes of time", right.
Time that could have been spent...
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.
Reopro is not a prophylactic (prevention) agent. Heparin or low molecular weight heparin is usually used in hospitals to prevent this to happen in the patients who stays in bed for many days or weeks. A filter in the lower vein cave to prevent the migration of the clots are something used. But honestly we can't seriously suggest all these options for these guys. These drugs all have potential secondary effects of bleeding anywhere (skin, GI tube, or even worse in the brain).
Usually as some of you said, the best advice is to walk like 2-5 min every hour. This is even more true for the women, taking birth control pill, pregnancy, smoking, or obese.
Deep vein thrombosis is a medical emergency. The symptoms are pain in the calf or leg, asymetric swollen leg, skin color change.
I did a computer engineering degree from 1995-1999 playing about 40 hours a week Warcraft II online. I then did my M.D. from 1999-2004, playing probably 20 hours a week Warcraft III online. I am now a resident 2 in diagnostic radiology. I was for sure addicted (or at least at risk) to these highly competitive games. I am a competitive person. Japan, Korea and US are all very competitive countries where competition is inherent to the culture. Probably inconsciently, for me these games were a way to show to someone else I was better than him. Any competitive human being gets satisfaction from this. Evolution forced this to be in our genes.
I disagree a little bit about the opinion saying it is a complete waste of time. Hand-eye coordination and speed is very useful in many works; complex decision about a multi-parameters real-time situation can also be useful in the life. If I had a software company or if I would be on the admission commitee of a medical school, I would hire any top 10 world players of a RTS game. At least if they can show they can be functionnal in the life.
The only thing I was honestly surprised to see about that article was the main cause of death. Before reading it, I was almost sure the main cause would be suicide like in many others addictions. They didn't even talk about it. Maybe this is only a underreporting bias where the relation of suicides aren't that clear with the hardcore gaming like in the case of the deep vein thrombosis relation.
For(k;;)(Fork();)