A study of 642 junior and senior high school students by a team of researchers from Catholic University St. Mary's Hospital showed that 9.5 percent or 61 were addicted to the Internet, most of them to online games. The average IQ of teens addicted to the Internet was 97.7, 4.7 points lower than the average of 102.4, and they displayed lower comprehension, literacy and numeracy skills.
Internet game addiction not only lowers intelligence but triggers problems in the neural network just like narcotics, according to studies conducted in recent years in Korea, China and Taiwan. Once addicted to Internet games, the brain apparently secretes the stimulant dopamine, which causes problems in the way the frontal lobe operates and hinders cognition. A team of medical experts at Seoul National University Hospital in Bundang conducted a PET scan on the brains of 11 Internet addicts and found that some parts of their brains, including the frontal lobe, were activated just like the brains of cocaine addicts. The reason there are fewer teens sniffing glue these days is that Internet games have replaced it, some experts claim.
The personalities of teens addicted to the Internet become aggressive, and they often have problems adjusting to school and fight with their parents. The addiction is also inversely proportional to parents' income, because the poorer the family, the higher the chances are that their children are left at home without supervision. The government began to implement a so-called shutdown system in November last year that stops youngsters from accessing online game sites from midnight until 6 a.m., while another program, to be implemented soon, informs parents of the number of hours their kids have played online games. But these measures are useless if a child accesses game sites using their parent’s ID. Online games for adults must be made accessible by a PIN issued to adults only.
Some online game companies made more than W1 trillion (US$1=W1,137) in revenues last year and more than W500 billion in operating profits. They must not allow themselves to be blinded by money to the lives of children being torn apart. They need to set aside some of their profits to set up online addiction prevention centers or treatment clinics and come up with a variety of counseling and rehab programs.