< I thought I was a serious gamer. My endurance is not nearly
as good as these guys. I can only play about 8 hours in a day, maybe
6 hours straight. >
Video Game Addicts Concern S.Korean Gov't
By VICTORIA KIM
Associated Press Writer
October 6, 2005, 7:08 AM EDT
SEOUL, South Korea -- Jun Mung-gyu remembers the throbbing pain in his
head and shoulder aches from spending as many as 15 hours a day
hunched over a computer keyboard battling his online foes.
"You have no life, you only focus on gaming, putting off everything,
like getting a haircut," recalled the 27-year-old Jun, who was able to
kick the habit earlier this year though he remains in the milieu,
running an Internet cafe in southeastern Seoul.
For others, the addiction has become all-consuming, raising concerns
about the health of the millions of gamers in the world's most wired
country.
The habit has even been deadly: In August, a 28-year-old man died
after nearly 50 straight hours of playing online computer games. The
man, whom police refused to identify by name, was moved to a hospital
after he collapsed while gaming and died three hours later.
Many of South Korea's 17 million gamers -- some 35 percent of the
population, principally males in their teens and twenties -- are
obsessive. At the 1,000 won-per-hour ($1) Internet cafes popular among
young South Koreans, they'll sit eyes glued to monitors for hours on
end. Sometimes play will extend for days.
"I've seen people who play games for months, just briefly going home
for a change of clothing, taking care of all their eating and sleeping
here," Jun said.
Gamers camped out at Internet cafes typically live on instant cup
noodles and cigarettes, barely sleeping and seldom washing.
In this country of 48 million people with the world's highest
per-capita rate of broadband connectivity at 70 percent, the rise in
addiction to multiplayer online gaming is alarming psychologists.
The number of counseling sessions for game addiction quadrupled last
year, the government says. There were 8,978 sessions in 2004 compared
with 2,243 cases the previous year, and the first seven months of this
year saw 7,649 sessions.
This year's gaming death wasn't the first such case of someone dying
at a computer terminal in this game-crazed nation: In 2002, a man died
in Kwangju after 86 hours of marathon gaming.
The latest casualty collapsed Aug. 5 in the southern city of Daegu
after having eaten minimally and not sleeping.
Doctors said they presumed he died of heart failure; no autopsy was
performed. So obsessed by gaming was the man that he was reported to
have lost his office worker job due to absenteeism.
"Such an addiction upsets the foundation of your life," said Kim
Kyung-bin, a Seoul psychiatrist who counsels gaming addicts.
One of Kim's patients, a high school student, would leave his house
and not come back for weeks, practically living in Internet cafes
playing games, Kim said.
Computer games can also be a path to big rewards. Three cable channels
are devoted to broadcasting game matches and a total of 4.5 billion
won ($4.4 million) is given out as prize money in competitions each
year.
Even the government is embracing electronic sports, or "E-sports,"
funding construction of the world's first e-sports stadium, to be
completed by 2008, where online competitions will be displayed on huge
screens.
Hong Jin-ho, a 24-year-old professional gamer, earns more than 133
million won ($130,000) a year, living and training with his fellow
game team members in an apartment in central Seoul.
Hong, who specializes in Starcraft, a science-fiction strategy game,
says he has never thought of video games as an addiction.
He admitted, however, that the seven to eight hours of daily training
-- which sometimes drags on for nearly 24 hours before competitions --
can be physically challenging.
"My body doesn't welcome it, but I do it to win," Hong said.
Physicians working with professional e-sports teams recommend gamers
rest 10 minutes with their eyes closed after every five matches, and
never play in the same posture for more than two hours.
"The energy you consume (while playing) is immense. The degree of
concentration and absorption is so great that you lose yourself," said
Han Hye-won, 30, a university lecturer who says she plays four hours a
day.
Han said she went through a phase when her mother had to pull the plug
to get her to stop playing the battle simulation game Starcraft. She
teaches "digital storytelling," the craft of writing scenarios for
computer games.
Even Han's interaction with her students has gone virtual. She sets a
certain time at which the class meets inside the game world, each in
their virtual persona.
"You can play games like that because others are involved," Han said
of serious game addiction. "It's not a game problem, it's people who
had difficulty communicating with others resolving that difficulty
through online games."
http://www.newsday.com/technology/wire/sns-ap-korea-online-game-addicts,0,4462664.story
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"Under the guise of anonymity, whether it is on the internet, or on the roadway, a person's true nature will come forward."
-- Me
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