Minor Thoughts from me to you

Despite the certain eyeball-rolling from the young ladies in our lives we know is sure to come - or perhaps, in fact, because of it - your Minor Thoughts correspondents feel we cannot possibly consider ourselves socially-responsible bloggers without mentioning the latest on video-game addiction.

So: According to The Economist,

"Both console gaming [i.e., Nintendo, Playstation, et al.] and its online counterpart ["multiplayer online gaming"] are booming businesses that are set to keep on growing. In 2004 the industry saw its revenues overtake those generated by film box-office receipts. This year it is expected to outstrip the music business with revenues of $37.5 billion, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), a consultancy. And the games industry is forecast to expand by over 9% annually over the next few years to become worth $48.9 billion by 2011."

The Republic of Korea, "home to the world's most extreme gamer culture" (The Washington Post)), is of course greeting this news with only slightly less enthusiasm than it would the melting of all polar ice caps.

[In 2006] the government -- which opened a treatment center in 2002 -- launched a game addiction hotline. Hundreds of private hospitals and psychiatric clinics have opened units to treat the problem... An estimated 2.4 percent of the population from 9 to 39 are believed to be suffering from game addiction, according to a government-funded survey. Another 10.2 percent were found to be "borderline cases" at risk of addiction -- defined as an obsession with playing electronic games to the point of sleep deprivation, disruption of daily life and a loosening grip on reality."

Never mind that the above symptoms are also typical of Korean life in general; contemplate instead facing a future in which there exist double the number of nerds alive today. Korea's government sure is. And while admittedly, the concept produces a few obvious positives - for one thing, that 5+% of the male population will obviously not be mating, and that's good news for a country about to experience a dire shortage of females - the "Land of the Morning Calm" just feels it is not quite yet ready to concede that its proud, ancient warrior tradition has come down to how well it plays Halo.

Which is why, at this point, war with France is its best option.

Blizzard HQ

I'm an American and I know Terrorism when I see it (and I see it everywhere). This influx of next-generation games on Korea is certainly nothing less than Cultural Terrorism. And, as the Israelis can tell you, if there's to be any hope of ending terrorist attacks, the country must cut them off at the source: those rogue states which serve as their nurseries.

Game-wise, that oddly enough means France, which is at least good fortune for Korea in that it's one nation the R.O.K. can conceivably conquer. Unbeknownst to innocent adult-adolescents everywhere, the tentacles delivering their favorite computer crack have for years led back to the French multinational beast that is - Vivendi! The froggy biz is responsible for some of the best-known games on this planet, including the current holy grail of all gaming experiences, the seminal World of Warcraft itself.

Who could have ever suspected that a development firm with a name like "Blizzard" would start each day by singing La Marseillaise (Do they even have blizzards in France? You never hear about them, at least not in the US)? But then, really, who could have suspected the French of going into the video game industry at all, and doing well at it? Maybe it's just our twenty-plus years of experience with company names like "Nintendo" and "Atari", but we Americans tend to expect our geek culture to come from the East; we gave up on the Old World long ago. How is this understandable?

The simple answer is: it's not. And people fear what they don't understand. And they hate what they fear.

Ergo, we here at Minor Thoughts hate this development, and urge that Korea teach this Eurotrash to meddle in our affairs but good. They need to be made an example out of before we all learn, to our infinite self-loathing, that the Finns are behind our favorite action movies.