South Korea Cracks Down on Gaming Addiction

Ever since Yoon Hyuk-joo, a 16-year-old in Seoul, started playing the popular computer game StarCraft eight years ago, studying has taken the backseat. For six hours every day in dim, smoky Internet cafés known in the South Korean capital as “PC Bangs,” Yoon leads a squad of soldiers in Battlefield Online and then maims the undead in Counter-Strike: Zombies. His idols aren’t your usual baseball players or pop-music stars: the high school student looks to inspiration from Lim Yo-hwan, known in South Korea as “the Emperor.” Lim is one of the most successful professional StarCraft players of all time, whose celebrity has spurred fans to label him and his actress girlfriend as the South Korean equivalent of Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore.

But in a country where video-game champions live like rock stars, Yoon concedes that too many teenagers are getting hooked on the hobby. He was pleased last week when the government ordered what it calls a “nighttime shutdown” for gamers: the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism directed the operators of the three most popular games to block people under age 18 from playing games between midnight and 8 a.m. starting in September. Another rule will significantly slow down the Internet connections of young players if they engage for too many hours into the night, rendering the more graphics-intensive games unplayable, and several other bills are pending in the National Assembly that could restrict kids’ gaming habits even further. “It’s a great idea,” says Yoon. “Video-game addiction is having bad effects on our generation. The kids have to study and grow up eventually.”

(See pictures of South Korean video gamers.)

South Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world, but that connectivity comes with a price. Since the early 2000s, occasional reports of compulsive gamers dying or murdering loved ones to satisfy their addiction have raised hackles at the industry, a domestic market valued at about $2.4 billion in which 30 million people are thought to play regularly. The government introduced the recent nighttime shutdown one month after police discovered a 3-month-old baby who starved to death while her parents were busy nurturing their virtual baby on a game at an Internet café.

The curfew also comes one month after the Korean e-Sports Players Association, a governing body of professional computer-game sports, reportedly filed charges against a group of retired StarCraft players and officials for allegedly manipulating the betting system — a testament to how seriously some Koreans have come to take the game. In February, a 22-year-old Korean man was charged with murdering his mother after she pestered him to stop playing. And in 2005, in one of the most famous cases, a 28-year-old man went into cardiac arrest and died after playing StarCraft for 50 hours straight, with only a few bathroom breaks. That was a particularly bad year for the country, when 10 people died from related causes to video-game addiction.

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Psychologists estimate that 10% of South Korean schoolchildren have shown signs of video-game addiction, thought by some psychiatrists to be one of the highest rates in the world, along with that of China. Video-game addiction — though not officially recognized in the U.S. by the American Psychological Association — typically includes symptoms like becoming withdrawn or angry when not allowed to play. Severe cases can result in addicts’ simply not eating or sleeping until they’re back on their binge. For years, South Korea has been at the forefront of treating the disorder. In 2002, before the issue had risen to global prominence, the government opened one of the region’s first Internet-addiction treatment centers, perched away in the countryside. Since then, hundreds of private hospitals and clinics in the country have opened specialized units to treat the disorder, and the government even opened a hotline for gaming addicts in 2006. At the treatment centers, patients typically spend two weeks or more detoxing from video games by partaking in outdoor activities and arts and crafts. They also discuss with counselors the problems that video games have created for their health and social lives, supposedly releasing their anxiety.

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South Korea is not alone in its quest. The Chinese government has opened at least eight treatment clinics for compulsive gamers; in the past staff members at some clinics allegedly used electric shocks on patients and forced them into locked cells. Controversy over the methods led the Ministry of Health in 2009 to order a clinic in Shandong province to halt its practices. China, too, has recorded a number of bizarre video-game-related deaths. In 2005, a 13-year-old boy jumped off a building in Tianjin province, leaving several suicide notes written from the perspective of his character in World of Warcraft. More recently, the U.S. has been acknowledging the problem. In 2009, a large rehabilitation center opened near Seattle, while other, smaller clinics scattered throughout the country have treated computer addiction for decades. In Europe, the first treatment clinic for obsessive gamers opened in Amsterdam in 2006.

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Critics say that by imposing a curfew on computer games, the South Korean government is attacking a symptom, not the root of the problem. They point out that South Koreans work by far the most hours among the 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, an international body based in Paris that comprises the world’s richest countries. Added to that, parents often pressure youngsters to study at intensive “cram schools” late into the night, another factor experts say creates stress and has contributed to the country’s video-game-addiction problem.

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Others who oppose the new curfew say it’s a matter of business. “Regulating

is a violation of the rights of game users and developers,” says Koh Byung-hun, head of the Korea Game Development Association, a trade organization based in Seoul. “Korea is popular for its gaming industry. This kind of regulation is contrary to what the government says it wants for the industry.” Two of South Korea’s largest game developers, NCSoft and Nexon, control almost a quarter of the world gaming market. Teenagers could also find ways to outwit what some see as a clumsy solution. “If teenagers can’t play games late at night, they will find other ways to have fun by drinking and smoking,” says Shin Tae-kyun, a 17-year-old gamer. “Or instead of playing during the night, they’ll play during the day, when they should be studying.”

Some teenagers have already been exploiting loopholes to play games that are restricted to adults by signing up using their parents’ government-assigned identification numbers, which are used to open online gaming accounts. To better enforce the new curfew, the government says it might begin fining parents whose ID numbers are being used by their children. Still, with many gamers clamoring over the rumored release of StarCraft II later this year, government officials may soon be overwhelmed as they try to put restraints on an intense national sport.

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