Must play games

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, October 8, 2005

SEOUL, South Korea – Jun Mung-gyu remembers the throbbing pain in his head and shoulder aches from spending as many as 15 hours a day hunched over a computer keyboard battling his online foes.

“You have no life, you only focus on gaming, putting off everything, like getting a haircut,” recalled the 27-year-old Jun, who was able to kick the habit earlier this year though he remains in the milieu, running an Internet cafe in southeastern Seoul.

For others, the addiction has become all-consuming, raising concerns about the health of the millions of gamers in the world’s most wired country.

The habit has even been deadly: In August, a 28-year-old man died after nearly 50 straight hours of playing online computer games. The man, whom police refused to identify by name, was moved to a hospital after he collapsed while gaming and died three hours later.

Many of South Korea’s 17 million gamers – some 35 percent of the population, principally males in their teens and 20s – are obsessive. At the 1,000 won-per-hour ($1) Internet cafes popular among young South Koreans, they’ll sit eyes glued to monitors for hours on end. Sometimes play will extend for days.

“I’ve seen people who play games for months, just briefly going home for a change of clothing, taking care of all their eating and sleeping here,” Jun said.

Gamers camped out at Internet cafes typically live on instant cup noodles and cigarettes, barely sleeping and seldom washing.

In this country of 48 million people with the world’s highest per-capita rate of broadband connectivity at 70 percent, the rise in addiction to multiplayer online gaming is alarming psychologists.

The number of counseling sessions for game addiction quadrupled last year, the government says. There were 8,978 sessions in 2004 compared with 2,243 cases the previous year, and the first seven months of this year saw 7,649 sessions.

This year’s gaming death wasn’t the first such case of someone dying at a computer terminal in this game-crazed nation: In 2002, a man died in Kwangju after 86 hours of marathon gaming.

The latest casualty collapsed Aug. 5 in the southern city of Daegu after having eaten minimally and not sleeping.

Doctors said they presumed he died of heart failure; no autopsy was performed. So obsessed by gaming was the man that he was reported to have lost his office worker job due to absenteeism.

Associated Press

An office worker plays an online computer game at a Seoul Internet cafe.