Hooked on the virtual world: A reality in South Korea
By Choe Sang-Hun International Herald Tribune
Published: June 11, 2006
SEOUL Kim Hee Young, 24, knows how addictive a fantasy world can become.
For six months after her admission to a top-notch Seoul university in 2000, Kim said, she secluded herself in her room more than 20 hours a day, prowling a virtual world where she morphed into a tank gunner catapulting fireballs at enemy castles inhabited by trolls and elves. She slept only a few hours a day and ate at the keyboard. She was losing weight, relations with her parents got testy, and she was failing nearly all of her classes.
"I occasionally conked out and slept an entire day to refill my energy," Kim said. "What amazed me even then was that there were so many people like me out there. We formed a guild and took turns to keep battles against our foes going around the clock."
Kim knew it was ruining her life and she tried to kick the habit but couldn't. Finally, she thought the only way to salvage herself from the depth of gaming addiction was to leave South Korea, the world's most wired country, where widespread high-speed Internet connectivity makes online games a national pastime. Six out of 10 South Koreans ages 9 to 39 consider themselves frequent online game players, according to a government-funded survey published this year.
"I first thought of going to the United States, but I knew I would return to the games as long as I had high-speed Internet," Kim said. "So I went to Taichung, a Taiwanese city, for a Chinese language course. I took the game CD with me, but in Taichung the Internet was still slow, and I could finally quit the habit."
Kim is now back in her school and highly motivated in her dentistry studies. But an estimated one million South Korean gamers suffer symptoms of serious addiction, experts say. These people are so obsessed with online gaming that they neglect eating and bathing, skip school or quit jobs, playing the games for hours or days at a stretch - and in several cases a year, until they drop dead.
"If other countries have drug and alcohol problems, we have online gaming addiction," said Kim Hyun Soo, a psychiatrist in Seoul whose clinic receives one new serious gaming addict a day.
Experts say the problem in South Korea may provide an early warning of things to come for other countries.
South Korea has the world's highest per capita rate of broadband connectivity, at 78 percent. It is a trend created by South Koreans' fascination with new technology, a government policy of encouraging the Internet as an engine for economic growth, and urban clusters of high-rise apartment blocks that make broadband networks commercially viable.
Here, Internet cafés are as commonplace as phone booths once were, and most are filled with people playing online games.
Here, the fan Web site with the most members - 600,000 - is not for a sex- symbol pop singer but for Lim Yo Hwan, a 26-year-old online gamer with a 250 million won, or $268,000, salary from SK Telecom, a leading mobile phone company.
Under corporate sponsorship, platoons of young cyberspace warriors like Lim eat and sleep in dormitories, training for "e- sports" leagues that participate in competitions. The games are broadcast live on cable channels or watched at e-sports studios, where hundreds of fans cheer or weep over their heroes' fates. Last year, 100,000 people gathered at a beach to watch Lim play the science-fiction game "World of Warcraft" on giant screens.
Experts say that South Korean society's relentless focus on competition and its shortage of recreational diversions force millions of students and adults to escape into cyberspace and battle for the status they may never achieve in the real world.
In multiplayer role-playing games, they are transformed into knights who slays dragons, spaceship captains who save the world from aliens, or princesses who crusade for a lost throne in medieval Europe.
"In the games, you can lead a large guild even if you are a teenager," said Kim Hyo Jung at the YMCA's counseling center for Internet addicts in Seoul. "People much older beg you to accept them into your alliance. This is a fascinating escape for teenagers, for example, who are bullied or can't otherwise adapt to the pressure-cooker school system where all efforts are focused on getting good grades."
Some play themselves to death. Last year, the deaths of at least seven people were attributed to excessive game- playing. In August, a 28-year-old man died after nearly 50 straight hours of playing online games. In December, a 38-year-old day worker collapsed and died at an Internet café; his logs showed that he had played for 417 hours in his last 20 days. There are private telephone emergency services that dispatch ambulances for children who collapse while gaming or refuse to come out of their rooms, where they remain glued to online games or threaten violence at intervening parents.
In South Korea, children get used to the Internet at early age. A survey last year by the Ministry of Information and Communication showed that nearly half of children between the ages of 3 and 5 use the Internet.
"In South Korea, the Internet has become a baby sitter," said Lee Kyong Ok, a professor at Duksung Women's University in Seoul.
Gaming consoles like Sony's PlayStation have never taken off among South Koreans to the degree seen in the United States. Instead, online role- playing games, where participants make friends and band together in clans, have a strong appeal to Koreans, who live in a tightly woven and hierarchical Confucian society.
"One problem with those games is that you build your online persona through countless hours of battles, and you develop a huge emotional attachment to your game character," said Chang Woo Min, a onetime online gamer who is now a counselor at the government-run Center for Internet Addiction Prevention and Counseling.
Chang cited reports of youngsters who traced the players who killed their characters and attacked them physically, or girls who resorted to prostitution for game-playing money.
Kim Hyo Jung of the YMCA recently counseled four high school students who were in a jail, charged with swindling 20 million won from other teenagers who wanted to buy virtual weapons, like a magic sword, to fight better and upgrade their game levels.
The fantasy role-playing game "Lineage," created by NCSoft, the largest online game company in the country, is so popular that its magic swords are sold for as much as 3 million won in real cash on numerous Web sites where people trade in online game items.
The volume of such trading is estimated at a trillion won a year, according to the government-affiliated Korea Game Development & Promotion Institute. In "item factories," owners equip their rooms with computers and hire people who play games to accumulate online weapons for sales or strengthen clients' gaming characters.
The number of people who received counseling at the government-run center increased to 32,800 last year from 2,600 in 2002. Parents report children who steal money and do not come home for days and even weeks, practically living in Internet cafés, and sons who refuse to find jobs and play games all night and sleep during the day.
"I cannot concentrate in the library, but when I enter an Internet café, I feel my brain clearing up," said an 18-year- old whose interview transcripts were released by the center with his consent. "I play the games as long as my money lasts. I cannot stop myself."
The authorities require Internet cafés to keep their distance from schools, and they open camps for teenage addicts and distribute booklets on the dangers of game addiction. In addition, they are training hundreds of counselors, who visit schools, Internet cafés and military units.
Game sites advise players to take breaks and to "not confuse their real self with their game characters."
In the 28,000 Internet cafés in South Korea, minors are banned from entry after 10 p.m. The authorities have even discussed reducing the points of gamers who play for more than three consecutive hours. But such talks have produced no agreement, amid concerns that such restrictions would jeopardize a high-growth industry and worsen the problem of teenagers stealing adult online identification numbers.
"Sooner or later we will be able to announce our measures," the minister for information and communication, Rho Jun Hyoung, said at a news conference in May. "Since South Korea is one of the most active and developed countries in the Internet, the world is paying great attention to what policy we will adopt on this problem."
This isn't anyones fault but his own. For 10 months, I've always been here for him, been his ride, willing to drop everything for him, never cheated. My family has spent hundreds on him for a cruise ticket, and he was charged with two felonies(an entirely different story on it's own-he wasn't guilty) and MY MOTHER was the one who got his charges dropped........dude, for real......I feel like My family and I have given so much, but we haven't gotten shit in return. I know I deserve better for myself, and at this point, I'm even happy he's out of my life. He'll wish he listened to me, I know him.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
