In 2010 a young South Korean couple were charged with manslaughter after their malnourished 3-month-old baby starved to death after they had abandoned her to go play online games at a cyber cafe for 12 hour stints. The Judge had been persuaded that their gaming addiction was technically an illness and made them not culpable for the death of their baby. The irony of the situation was that the game the two were obsessed with was called Prius and it involved them creating a avatar child which they brought up as their own.
Filmmaker Valerie Leitch picked up on this very sad situation from a BBC News Report and hot-footed it to Seoul to make a film to tell the couple's story. What emerged was not pretty at all. The impoverished pair with somewhat limited IQ's had no emotional support and were in such denial of the reality of becoming parents, that the mother didn't actually seek any medical advise/help until the baby was about to be born. They used gaming to provide them with a limited income, but their addiction rendered them outwardly emotionless. The virtual world they created became the means to achieve the only happiness they had in life.
After interviewing them, and their own parents, the Police and everybody else connected to the case, Leitch took a 360 degree turn and decided to make the focus of the movie less about the plight of the couple, and more about society's attitude to all the repercussions of the combination of gaming and digital cultures which seems to be spiralling out of control.
South Korea has one of the most advanced information and communication technology infrastructures in the world. One of the reasons that this couple, like so many other people, preferred using Game Cafes was they offered such powerful broadbands that were not affordable/available in homes at that time. Whether that increases the possibility of a more rapid rise in electronic abuse is not clear, but then again part of the message of Leitch's take on this is that she obviously didn't agree that it could all simply be summed up as an addiction.
What she tries to show is her belief that there is a collapse between the virtual world and the real world in terms of how we socially, spiritually and emotionally address these problems. Its a very valid message but her presentation of it by mixing up interviews with footage of the games themselves and some psychedelic imagery was in itself confusing and somewhat messy at times.
Like other movies surfacing now that are about the excessive use of Internet gaming like 'Web Junkie', this movie highlights the problem but like the grossly inadequate Addiction Clinics, it proffers no concept of a solution or even optimism that there will be one. In the footnote to this we are told that the offending game Prius has now been withdrawn from the market .....but not for the adverse way if affects the vulnerable, but just purely for economic reasons as it simply lost its popularity.
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