Must Be 17 Or Older to Play Online at Midnight? OH, NO!

Online gaming shutdown law for adolescents(age under or equals with 16) in South Korea will be enforced from November 20. The law demands game providers shut down their service to adolescents from 0 a.m. to 6 a.m. This is one of the policies to protect Korea adolescents from gaming addiction. However, it does arouse great controversy among the society.

The curfew for South Korean underage players face opposition from Cultural solidarity organization MoonHwaYunDae (MHYD), on behalf of a group of students and their parents. They filed an appeal to the Korea's Constitutional Court against the shutdown law. They claim that ithe shut down law only scratches the surface of the problem. Why do teens play these games so late? Why they get addicted to games? This is the root of the problem that merit attention.

Actually, the shutdown law affects not only adolescents but also adults and the whole game indusry in South Korea. A rant on Reddit may help you make sense of it.

Console manufacturers like Sony and Micrisoft have compromise to the law although it is a difficult task for PSN and Xbox live, because they haven't age verification. Sony Computer Entertainment of Korea has announced beginning November 18th, it will deny underage gamers access to PSN during the restricted hours and says it will somehow prevent those same individuals from creating new network accounts. This applies solely to the PS3, the upcoming PlayStation Vita may have a different plan.

Microsoft of Korea seems more thoroughly, it is reported that they may take Xbox Live offline at midnight for the entire country, restoring service at 6 the following morning every day. It will really be a tragedy for some adult Xbox Live gamers. The good news is that the South Korean government's Ministry of Culture, Sports & Tourism and Ministry of Gender Equality & Family have reportedly agreed to temporarily exclude mobile and console games from its controversial Shutdown Law, as they deem online gaming addictions on those platforms to be not as serious a problem. There will be a two-year grace period for those platforms.

In the long struggle to fight against gaming addiction, South Korea government has adopted a series of measures, say, bandwidth throttling for those who lengthy connected. Can these rather extreme policies really work? Someone can not help but wondering where are the parents? Why not should they get their children go to bed late at night but government? What if this happened in your country? Tell me your what you think.