South Korea Imposes Midnight Gaming Curfew

Video game addiction is a serious problem in Korea, where kids are prone to staying up all night long to play. So the government is disabling internet connections for six hours per night for underage gamers.

The ban won’t affect most internet uses, just a blacklist of 19 specific games. The ban will last either from midnight to 6am, 1am to 7am or 2am to 8am, with the time of the blackout up to the user. Furthermore, if you’re caught playing an online game for more than six hours straight during the day, your connection will be throttled.

Teenagers who want to play games in the future will need to register through their parents when they set up online accounts. How they’ll be stopped from just signing up as adults isn’t clear.

And whether or not it’s a good thing that it’s the government telling kids to not play video games all night long and not their parents is another question entirely. [The Korea Herald via Destructoid CrunchGear]