Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Addiction - Video Gaming

When people think of video games, rarely do they think of addiction. Society is starting to learn that video gaming addiction is the new up and coming addiction. This does not only apply to kids, but mostly to adults. There has been one instance in South Korea that a 28 year old man had died from playing 50 hours straight. The reason for his death was extreme exhaustion (see sources for article). This is just one example of an EXTREME case of video gaming addiction.

Lately, on the National Geographic channel, there is a new show called “Taboo”. This show includes acts regular people who do activities that are seen as taboo in societies. Recently, they aired an episode which touched the topic addictive gaming. They followed a South Korean boy who was sent to the government made camp called ‘rescue school’ (see sources for video). This school was only made because of South Koreas problem, video gaming addiction. Because of their problem, South Korea has recently passed a law that implies the internet services to shut off the internet after 12am to minors. What people do not know about South Korea is that they need their social security number to play games there. That is one way for the government to detect their age.

Even though video gaming addiction is new, parents will start to realize how much their children play video games and if they are addicted to it. This is one of the reasons why obesity is high in the United States. In my opinion, children are starting to move away from sports because gaming does not take athletic ability. The kids find a new way to be competitive and enjoy it more because video games do not alter their reality. They can get hurt or even die as many times as they want and still play.



  1. I hope that parents start to see video games as an addiction soon. I agree that more and more kids are staying inside and playing video games instead of getting outside and playing.

    I liked that you actually mentioned a video game addiction, since I believe it really is sweeping the world. Hopefully we will not start to see many extreme cases of deaths from this addictions. I cannot imagine playing a video game for that amount of time in one sitting.

  2. I think video game addictions are more serious than what some parents may think. Many times I think parents don't realize the severity of the issue. But when 8 year old children are spending all of their time inside playing video games (with sex, guns, and violence) how to parents not realize that this behavior is unacceptable? Kids should be outside playing and working on schoolwork.