Hysteria over children being led astray by the temptations of MMORPGs has prompted Korea to enact legislation banning youths from late night MMORPG sessions.
A supposed epidemic of “game addiction” reaching 7% of the nation’s schoolchildren, some 510,000 children, has prompted the government to ban under-age players from playing a selection of popular MMORPGs, including “Maple Story,” “Barameui Nara” and “Mabinogi.”
The ban is to be implemented by forcing gamers to choose a 6 hour period running from 12AM-6AM, 1AM-7AM, or 2AM-8AM.
Additionally, game makers are gradually being forced to implement “fatigue” systems in RPG titles, reducing drop rates or similar if the player spends a long period in game.
19 games are to be included in the “fatigue” system, thought to cover some 80% of the country’s market for online games, though some have noted that such popular titles as Lineage have escaped inclusion for now.
Korea’s legislation is similar in scope to that adopted in China, which has long scapegoated games as subversive elements, placing the nation in good company indeed.
The Korean government and mass media appear silent on the issue of whether parents actually bear any responsibility for what their children do at night – it seems not.
No fatigue meter. HATE fatigue meter just a time-waster and makes game annoying.
This ban is fail btw.
The solution is easy: no internet for kids up to 11 or 12 years.
I mean all you need is to not give the kids an ethernet cable or a wlan-antenna and they won’t be able to access the i-net at all. Seriously, kids don’t need the internet (at least we didn’t need it in our grade school/early high school days, so there’s no excuse to let your children go online) since the school doesn’t force you to reports until you’re at an age where you can gather reliable information(and even then,books are still better references <_<).
The internet is far worse than plating MMORPGs though, because while you're in another world, at least you're save from the perverts that lurk out there like child abusers,porn distributors, sects and cults, drug sellers and specific political organizations that are lurking everywhere out there (not to mention the hackers and other criminal identities…).
So the best solution would be to force the parents to ban their kids from using the internet via law. That way,nobody's gonna get harmed in any way (I seriously doubt that just banning MMORPGS would help, maybe they will just roam the net instead at night and get on suspicious sites like facebook/twitter/etc.).
Yeah, if you think that is actually going to happen and are not just being a sarcastic nitwit, you are insane.
Didn’t do a thing but make companies loose money. They just got back on using parent info and a gaming they went.
FAIL.
Needs lesser “parents let tv do the rearing” and more “child beating”
test…