Starting last week, if you are under the age of 16 in South Korea, you will be banned from playing online games after midnight in hopes to curb onling gaming addiciton on it's youth. They have worried about the problem as far back as 2000 and as of April this year, the Shutdown Law was passed and is now being put into effect.

This would ban all gamers under the age of 16 from playing any online games between 12AM and 6AM. The Shutdown Law, is also known as the Cinderella Law in it's home country and is apart of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and Ministry of Gender Equality and Family plan to "think of the children!" This was originally meant to just cover MMORPG's.  However it was later revised to include all online games - including PSN and XBLA networks, which have a "grace period" to teach their system analysts to track certain players in that age group.

The law had very few people who agreed with it, as many advocates for the gaming industry, such as the Korean Association of Games, which is made up of 14 different game developers and publishers, criticising the law for "excessive prohibition", compareable to that of alcohol bannings in the US. An appeal against the law has already been filed, but will not be handled lightly.

There are obvious ways around this law, such as teens claiming they're different ages or starting new accounts, etc. But the Ministry for Families wants gaming companies to be taking more details from their users to track them properly...anyone else thinks this is a bit shifty?

How do you think you'd cope if you had to stop your gaming between midnight and six? I don't really play that late, but I barely get enough sleep as it is. 

Via [GamaSutra]

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