This is a reprint of a transcript of a Podcast that I made in October of ‘06 I had done some research and ended up with a longer story some months later.<br><br>This week I want to point out something about a different sort of video game problem. South Korea is in the gaming news alot lately and I want to disscuss some things that have been going on in South Korea and other parts of Asia for some time now. In North Korea they live in a dictatorship, they have no access to any type of media at all the TV there is very lame they do not get any channels from the rest of the world. The only thing they can see is programming praising the “leaders” they have no life except to worship the dictators.<br><br>In South Korea it is very different, there are some of the most amazing gamers in the world that have been able to take gaming to the heights of Extreme sports. They live and breathe gaming, live in special gamer dojos, and compete for championships in settings like rockstars.<br><br>We may joke around about being “addicted” to video games. We are all looking for that “immersive experience”. Any stimuli can become more vivid and involving if a person is starving to death and sleep deprived. Real gaming addiction is actually deadly when immersion gets way out of hand.<br><br>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 and stay out at an internet cafe playing games online. You 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?<br><br>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. So 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.<br><br>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, 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 day ends on another gloomy sunless day for this worker. <br><br>No wonder some gamers obsessively turn to Massively Multiplayer Online worlds. It can be because in the their daily life they feel like lemmings. Because of all the over crowding, and spending so much time in the greenish fluorescent lighting. Day in and day out seeing nothing but machines and parts that look the same. The individual’s nature struggles to become more than one of the parts in a cog, or more than a cog in a wheel. <br><br>Does it sound like science fiction? Is it impossible or a scary glimpse of the future? Psychologists are studying the question of how the fantasy world could become that important for many of us. <br><br>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. <br><br><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><br><br>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. <br><br>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 World of Warcraft. Those parents were charged with involuntary manslaughter. <br><br>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 that parents and teachers there are very open to the Internet. They think their children are learning something about computers, and they allow them to play from a very young age.<br><br>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. <br><br>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. <br><br>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. <br><br>”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. <br><br>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.<br><br> 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.<br><br>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. <br><br>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. <br><br>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. <br><br>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. So this guy took the law into his own hands. <br><br>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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