Well, I've begun my 3 week teaching venture in Wuhan. I still have limited access to the internet so I can still get things done here.
Juvenile crime rate has risen by 70% here. The cause of this drastic rise in crime? Violation of the anti-online gaming addiction laws (a topic I posted about in the news a long while back). Its ammusing...70% of all crime committed by youngsters these days is simly playing too much online games.
I was watching TV the other say and saw an interesting debate on a talk show between a univeristy professor who has been treating young people with internet gaming addictions and a representative from a Korean online gaming company (presumably Nexon or Triggersoft). One topic that came up was about how online gaming companies were going to curve additicion before it began, and their main solution was adding ratings to games, however the prominant problem to that was by who's standards were games going to be rated? The government? The online game companies? the players? As some of you may know this has already been seen in some US released titles, which demends that players be over the age of 13 in order to play (usually just a block you have to check before signing on). The problem is there is no way to verify someone's age via online identity without committing some serious privacy invasion, which is why it will never work.
The professor was brought up the recent and extreme cases of online addiction, including the case of a young man who literally lived in an internet cafe for 3 months, another who committed suicide over social affairs in a game and another who wore diapers so he wouldnt have to get up and go to the bathroom.
The representative's defense was basically that any and all hobbies can be unheathy, both physically and mentally, if taken to an extreme. Even playing sports.
Current chinese law forbids players playing games for more then 5 hours. Online gaming companies based in china have implemented such restrictions in their services. However, once a player has played 5 hours of a game, there is nothing from stopping him from simply jumping onto another game (which he can play for an additional 5 hours, and so on), and that is where the law breaking comes in.
Clinics have opened in China, South Korea and the Netherlands specificaly to treat online gaming addiction (I have promtly sent the netherlands clinic Darky's name and address ^_^), showing that at least national governments in some countries are treating the problem with the same degree of seriousness as, say, drug addiction.
In Korea, online gaming is almost a professional sport, where players have vast fan bases and can have yearly earnings from tournements up to $250,000+. The professor says this is bad role-modeling.
