Category: 
So much is said about video game violence, but no one has proved that video games lead to crime. Crimes of apathy, and oppression are still very real and are crossing the line into the game world. We may joke around about being “addicted” to video games. We are all looking for that perfect “immersive experience”. Real gaming addiction is actually deadly when immersion gets way out of hand. Any stimuli can become more vivid and involving if a person is starving to death and sleep deprived.
Imagine living in a <i>Matrix</i> - like existence. Where everything
is the same day in and day out. You would do practically anything to
stay up all night and stay out at an internet cafe playing games online. You would
want to stay there in the bright warm lights. Remember when Cipher in
the <i>Matrix</i> movie sold everyone out just because he wanted to
taste a steak again?
Every morning you are stuffed into the same tightly crammed public
transport. You leave at dawn and by the time the sun is coming up you
are at work. You are inside a huge factory. The high ceilings emit a
grim white light. The walls are a steel gray, as is the machine that
you work at. The floors are gray. The uniform coveralls that each of
you wears is a slightly varied shade of gray with the occasional spot
of color bandana in red or black. Boots, shoes, or sandals are dull
scuffed indeterminable colors that don’t challenge the oppressive
hues. The machinery makes a monotonous loud clanging sound that has
to be shouted over for voices to be heard. There is little
conversation. Lunch break is the same packaged lunch each day. Cold
salted or preserved fish and cold rice since there isn’t anyplace for
food storage or hot food.
At the end of the day a bell sounds and everyone leaves to be replaced
in few minutes by the next shift. The work continues even after the
worker leaves, you are feeling interchangeable, expendable. Now exhausted,
workers shuffle away to the trams. They sway more on the return trip
and make less effort to steady themselves on the rickety ride back.
The evening ends on another gloomy sunless day for this worker.
No wonder some gamers obsessively turn to Massively Multiplayer Online
worlds. It can be because in the their daily life they feel like
lemmings. There is the over crowding, too much time is spent
in the greenish fluorescent lighting, day in and day out you are seeing
nothing but machines and parts looking all the same. A person needs some freedom. The individual’s nature struggles to become more than one of the parts in a cog, or more than a cog in a wheel.
Does it sound like science fiction? Is this reality impossible or is it a scary glimpse of the future? Psychologists are studying the question of how the fantasy world could become that important for many of us.
Perhaps this was the life of the Taegu South Korea man, Lee Seung
Seop. He reportedly was a skinny guy with glasses that wore a gray
polyester uniform for his job as a repairman of industrial boilers.
After work he was seen often frequenting a nearby Internet cafe. He
was 28. Sometimes he forgot to eat and didn’t sleep. When he began to
be progressively late for work they fired him. He was playing a 50
hour binge game of <i>World of Warcraft,</i> when he collapsed, fell
off his chair and died.
<blockquote>“He was so concentrated on his game that he forgot to eat
and sleep. He died of heart failure brought on by exhaustion and
dehydration,” said Park Young Woo, a psychiatrist at Taegu Fatima
Hospital, where Lee died. </blockquote>
South Koreans seem to be more hooked on the Internet than almost
anyone else. South Korea boasts of being the most wired country in the
world. Nearly three-quarters of its households have broadband
connections, whereas the U.S. is at about one-third. South Korean
authorities claim to have linked several deaths to excessive Internet
game-playing. Like the opium dens once were - the internet cafes
seduce people in and then they stay there disregarding their health
and real lives.
Last year there was a report that a 4 month old girl was left alone
at home in Inchon. She died of suffocation while her parents were at
an Internet cafe playing <i>World of Warcraft</i>. Those parents were charged
with involuntary manslaughter.
The Governmentally run Korean Agency for Digital Opportunity and
Promotion began sending psychologists into internet cafes to warn
players of the danger of internet addiction. It is thought by westerners that
parents and teachers there are very open to the Internet. They think
the children are learning something about computers, and they allow
them to play from a very young age.
Persistent online game worlds are thought to be especially appealing
to South Koreans because they live in small apartments with little
physical and psychological space of their own according to studies on
the demographics of WoW participants. People of both sexes and all
ages play, the most prevalent being lower class males in their 20’s
with unfulfilling jobs.
The most alluring games are the massively multiplayer online
role-playing games. In those virtual worlds participants make friends
and form other in - game alliances. By creating a fantasy persona
anyone can climb the social ladder. A person that feels downtrodden
can boost the ego by becoming a rogue, a thief, a knight, paladin, or
healer. Each game offers different races and professions to choose
from. In that unreal world a person can have as many second chances as
they can afford. Gaming rises above the level of an entertainment to a
virtual reality. In the games a person can acquire limitless amounts
of virtual treasures and gold.
Since cases like Lee’s came up late last year, the industry has become
more aware of the potentially addictive nature of MMO gaming. NCSoft
Corp. Is South Korea’s largest game developer, they have put warnings
in its popular games like “Lineage”, “Lineage II” and Guild Wars. The
notifications alert players beginning after an hour being online. The
messages remind the player that they ought to take a break.
“We want a decent, healthy gaming culture. Of course, you can’t force
people not to play games, just like you can’t force them not to
smoke,” said an NCSoft spokeswoman, Min Ji Seon.
International focus was poised on the news that Chinese player “Snowly” died after playing the online game <i>World of Warcraft</i> for several continuous days during a vacation time. Snowly’s friends said that She was a very diligent
member and a key official of their community. She was always online.
She was said to be preparing for a relatively difficult part of the
game for several days before her death. She told her friends that she
felt very tired and had very little rest.
A big online funeral was held last August for Snowly one week
after her death. The death of another gaming enthusiast nicknamed “Nan
Ren Gu Shi” followed soon after. Seven major game makers agreed to
install an anti-obsession system on eleven online game products last
fall.
Chinese authorities planned to set time limits on game play, it
remained unclear if it would be sent to government officials. Timers
have the potential to adversely impact online game play in China and
reduce total playing time which would limit profits for the operators.
The PR Manager Wu Yinan said the <i>World of Warcraft</i> online
game in China already has an anti-addiction system that is designed to
prevent players from playing the game for too many consecutive hours.
At a subconscious level there is something addicting about these games. The stories of bizarre collateral damage includes a gamer who killed his sister after he became confused between the online world and real life.
Those who are still immersed in the game world even when off line have
had a schizophrenic break and are unable to distinguish between
mundane reality and virtual reality. They have failed to understand
the difference between illusion and reality. In Beijing a Shanghai
online game player stabbed a person to death for selling his
cyber-sword. A person named Qiu Chengwei, 41, stabbed a man named Zhu
Caoyuan in the chest after he was told Zhu had sold his “dragon sabre”
that was used in the popular online game, <i>Legend of Mir 3</i>,
the China Daily said.
It seems that more of the game world’s aspects are spilling over into
every daily reality like a Salvador Dali painting. Ever more online
gamers are seeking restitution through the courts over stolen weapons
or items and gold. In China online goods aren’t tangible property and
until now were not protected by their laws. This guy took the law
into his own hands.
The armor, items and swords in games could be thought of as private
property since money and time is spent on acquiring them. The dangers
arise then the game gold has real world value. At that point one is
beyond immersion and onto virtually drowning.
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