South Korea is playing to death!

Gaming addiction has hit South Korea like a plague. They are truly getting to become more of a virtual community in every sense of the term. So much are they into it that it’s not only ruining their social lives but affecting their personalities too. South Korea is the world’s most wired country, where widespread high-speed Internet connectivity makes online games a national pastime. Six out of 10 South Koreans aged 9 to 39 consider themselves frequent online game players, according to a government-funded survey published this year. An estimated one million South Korean gamers suffer symptoms of serious addiction, experts say. These people are so obsessed with online gaming that they neglect eating and bathing, skip school or quit jobs, playing the games for hours or days at a stretch – and in several cases a year, until they drop dead. “If other countries have drug and alcohol problems, we have online gaming addiction,” said Kim Hyun Soo, a psychiatrist in Seoul whose clinic receives one new serious gaming addicts a day.

South Korea has the world’s highest per capita rate of broadband connectivity, at 78 percent. It is a trend created by South Koreans’ fascination with new technology, a government policy of encouraging the Internet as an engine for economic growth, and urban clusters of high-rise apartment blocks that make broadband networks commercially viable. Here, Internet cafés are as commonplace as phone booths once were, and most are filled with people playing online game. Some play themselves to death. Last year, the deaths of at least seven people were attributed to excessive game- playing. All work and no play must have made Jack a dumb boy but all play hasn’t done South Korea any good either.
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