Starcraft Cheating Woes

Gaming news from Korea.

I've posted a bit about the Korean Starcraft obsession a few times in the past. Well, there's a bit of commotion going on in the Korean "e-sport" world with a scandal involving some of the top players, coaches, and organizers. There has apparently been an illegal gambling ring going on with players throwing matches and leaking team information. Better yet, it's been known about for a while by organizers who tried to quietly take care of it.

This nicely illustrates how serious a thing Starcraft is in Korea.

In other Korean gaming news, the government is planning to impose a nightly ban on online games to fight the, "rising problem of video game addiction", and have students actually get some sleep. The plan is to ban 19 MMORPGs from 12am-6am each night as well as throttle games for for users online for a lengthy period of time.

I haven't yet found much on how these two things will be done technologically, or better still, how they're going to be able to tell the difference between teenagers and adults, but I'm thinking it's unlikely this will put any serious dampener on things.

Besides all of that, there's also the usual debate on whether "gaming addiction" actually exists, and if so, what should be done, but I'm not getting into that here and now.