Here’s a particularly distressing story out of South Korea: last week (Friday, May 28, 2010), a couple were convicted of abandoning their 3-month-old baby, who starved to death while they fed their online gaming habit. It goes without saying that this is an awful, appalling scenario, and that, beyond any punitive sentences, these two people will surely need intense therapeutic intervention in order to rehabilitate their respective criminal lapses in parental responsibility. You don’t really need to be a “think of the children” type to come to that conclusion.

But the story, as sad as it is in isolation, has become somewhat of a bellwether for the larger issue of internet addiction in South Korea, something we’ve touched on here before. While instances of teenage addiction have dropped slightly, it appears that adults (almost one million, according to the Ministry of Public Administration and Safety) are becoming more addicted to internet gaming such as large multiplayer online role-playing games. In response, the government  has announced plans to open adult rehab centres, and to expand counselling for students and the unemployed (groups considered especially vulnerable to compulsive internet gaming addiction).

Interestingly, while there don’t appear to be many calls for censorship of the games themselves — something markedly different from how this would likely have played out in the English-speaking world — the reason for that absence of moral outrage might not be as refreshingly admirable as it first appears. Because, well, it’s probably down to money. Turns out South Korea has a huge and leading stake in the $28.5 billion global video game industry, in which combined revenues of some 1,200 online gaming companies in Korea reached an estimated $1.94 billion last year.

On the one hand, given the self-serving nature of most countries whenever revenue is threatened, Korea’s response is both pragmatic and apparently sensible, and yet we’re still left with the nagging sense that the overall point has somehow been missed, that addiction itself is a symptom of something more fundamental in the lives of those afflicted, and that focusing on internet gaming alone feels strangely unsatisfying… as if when dealing with alcoholics we only provided help for beer-drinkers. Plus, is anyone asking (I mean really asking) why the number of adolescent addicts has been decreasing, particularly given the rise for twenty- and thirty-somethings? And then, of course, there are those who engage in online gaming who are wondering why their own particular hobby is being so negatively singled out in contrast to others:

“Online games are a culture. [...] To me, people who hike or fish are as crazy as they think I am.”

In other words, something still feels off: if two million Koreans of all ages are addicted, and there is only a single case of a baby starving to death (which admittedly is one case too many), how large is the overall problem in terms of human misery? Sigh. But we’ve been here before, asking questions instead of providing answers. Hopefully, before we move on, we can point our readers toward any potentially productive trail markers we may have noticed up ahead.