Korea Times: Prepaid Game Cards Cause Addiction
By Ron on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 10:50 AM PST In Gamer Life
Over at the Korea Times, there’s an article that puts forth the ridiculous notion that prepaid game cards help to further addiction to games.
“As a teenager you are required to get permission from parents when you want to pay for your game fees through cell phones. However, prepaid cards do not require such a process. Thus, I, and many of my friends, use the prepaid card for playing online games,” said Lim Dong-hwan, an 11-year-old student who lives in Daechi-dong, which is located in southern Seoul.
Because of comments like these, Korean parents, rather than establish rules about game playing and computer usage, have decided to look for someone to scapegoat. What’s the convenient target? Prepaid game cards. “Prepaid cards for online games are being sold to children without any restriction. More and more children are becoming addicted to games due to the free access of such cards,” said Lee Song-hee, a 42-year-old mother. “I also think it is important to educate teenagers on the use of prepaid cards.” She also supports regulations to limit sales of prepaid cards to children, because she thinks that it will prevent kids from becoming addicted to online games.
The problem is that commercial game rooms are common in Korea, and kids can use their cards there. However, common sense would tell me that limiting access to the game rooms would be the answer. Perhaps requiring players of online games in these game rooms to be of a certain age? Or, dare I suggest, parents actually get involved in monitoring what their kids are doing?
I know it’s a radical suggestion, but the root cause of gaming addictions in kids is POOR PARENTING. Heck, the game developers are SUPPOSED to make games people want to play all the time. Parents, on the other hand, are supposed to keep an eye on what their kids are doing, and make them stop playing games if it’s becoming a problem.
Just as fast food restaurants are being blamed for obesity in America, games are being blamed for these obsessions for NO REASON. If you’re an adult, you have to know what moderation means. If you’re a parent, maybe you should teach your kids what it means, or god forbid, actually pay attention to what they are doing for a while. If you can’t manage that, you should at least stop trying to blame others for your shortcoming.
Every time I see an article blaming MMOs for addiction, I see it get cut down/bad mouthed by this website. Gaming news articles are extremly crappy and does not provide any good view/reasoning for any views they have. Its almost as if the website’s being run by a high school drop out. Please write better articles.
The reasoning here is actually quite simple. The game itself is not to blame for the player’s poor judgment in allocating his game time. As I said above, if your kids are addicted to games, you need to step up your parenting. When I was growing up, I played a ton of games, but my parents were adamant about not letting them be all I did. They would not allow me to develop a so-called ‘game addiction.’
As with any other aspect of life, regulating something is not the answer to to the problem. Government regulation is not the answer to any social problem. To put forth the idea that regulation is the answer is simply a case of a parent looking for a scapegoat for their failings.
Games shouldn’t think for you. You should have some self control and restrict yourself. They don’t shut off automatically after 3 hours. You have control over your game time. Games are meant to be played often, who would buy a game if they knew they’d only want to play it once a month? Get real, poor parenting should not be excused by blaming the game developers. You know that you didn’t restrict your child’s gaming time.