“Time for bed, honey!”

-”but moooom just ten more minutes and i’ll be done!”

Does this sound familiar? In South Korea, it may not be someone’s mother yelling to turn out the lights and get into bed. The government is stepping in to finally take action on a menace that has been ravaging the country’s youth: video games. That’s right, it’s not hard drugs or gangs, it’s online games. You may notice a dropoff in the number of friends you have playing World of Warcraft with from Korea in the near future.

Online gaming is treated like a sport in South Korea, BBC

The Korea Herald is reporting that the government will be cutting off or slowing down gaming connections to implement this ban. The problem is that this will actually affect adults too. The indiscriminate shutting off or slowing down of internet connections would surely rile up some people in the U.S. so we shall see if there is backlash in South Korea. I can’t imagine how quickly the U.S. government would step in if AT&T slowed down its internet access (somehow even more than usual) to ban online games past midnight.

We invite you to check out the article which features the following nuggets of gold:

While the policy is the first of its kind drummed up to combat online game addiction  critics feel underaged gamers will simply find ways to get around to the enforcement.

And of course the fact that people are dying from playing online games:

Calls for drastic measures have been made since a slew of headline-making incidents riveted the nation. Cases which ranged from gamers dying after having spent days and even weeks at PC rooms without a break and the death of a newborn through starvation from a couple’s neglect and addiction to online gaming rocked the nation.