Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD: From Super Mario to Final Fantasy, gaming have long been associated with Japan. However, some experts and parents worry that a growing addiction problem is going unaddressed.
Some Japanese families feel they are being left to handle the problem independently. At the same time, close-by countries like China and South Korea have recently imposed severe restrictions on youth gaming with mixed results. A group of parents meets monthly in Tokyo to discuss how to deal with their children’s gaming habits.
One father remarks, “My only consolation is that he has been keeping his promise to stay offline overnight, while another confides that their child has been attending a rehab day camp. Sakiko Kuroda, the group’s founder, says that children in Japan are now playing video games as early as primary school and that pandemic restrictions mean that many are playing for longer periods of time.
According to Kuroda, who formed the club in 2019 as an unofficial meet-up, many parents are unclear about how to manage the circumstance and there is “a lack of action by government and the game business.”
“People from all over the country come to participate because this type of self-help gathering is uncommon in Japan.” According to the World Health Organization, “gaming disorder” is a behavior that lasts at least a year and causes “significant impairment” in areas like relationships, education, or employment.
It is difficult to quantify the issue because gaming can overlap with other online activities like social media use. Still, anecdotal evidence from doctors suggests more Japanese families are concerned – particularly since the pandemic.
Gaming all night
According to a survey conducted by the education ministry in April, children between the ages of six and twelve now play video games for an average of 17% of their waking hours, up from 9% in 2017. Children between the ages of 12 and 15 also experienced a similar increase.
Mia Itoshiro, who works with a group that offers seminars on preventing gaming addiction, said that games have cunning systems to entice players to keep playing, such as constantly updated apps and virtual currency.
Parents are coming to us more often to say, “My kids can’t go to school because they’re exhausted from playing all night,”
In November, China declared that it had “solved” the problem of youth gaming addiction by limiting the number of time kids can spend playing online games to just three hours per week. This restriction is enforced using facial recognition software and ID registration.
In the meantime, South Korea lifted a decade-long ban on PC-based online gaming for kids under 16 between midnight and six in the morning last year, which the country’s media had criticized as antiquated and ineffective.
Japan has never had similar regulations, and even a hotly contested local ordinance from 2020 forbidding children under 18 from playing for more than an hour on weekdays lacked an enforcement mechanism.
According to parents and experts, gaming can lead to obsessive behavior in kids because of other issues like bullying or stress related to childhood.
A mother of a 13-year-old girl told AFP that her daughter used video games as a “lifeline” when she was having difficulty in school. The mother’s then-10-year-old daughter responded, “If you deprive me of this, I’d want to die,” when she attempted to take the girl’s tablet.
The mother said, “I was shocked to hear her say something like that. Others who have developed a gaming addiction claim that it saved them during difficult times.
Underlying problems
Takahisa Masuda, a social worker in his forties, says that when he was a middle schooler who was being bullied, he turned to video games as an escape.
Masuda says, “I had considered killing myself, but I wanted to finish Dragon Quest.”
By the time he had, he had gained the courage to confront his tormentors and committed to his studies, achieving his dream of working in the video game industry.
Susumu Higuchi, a physician and the director of the Kurihama Medical and Addiction Center, instead recommends counseling for kids to address underlying issues. In contrast, parents are frequently inclined to forbid gaming or take away devices.
His clinic also offers offline activities like cooking, sports, and the arts to expose patients to new pastimes and social settings. He wants more action from the state and businesses to keep kids from developing addictions in the first place.
Higuchi also said that “discussing gaming and online tools requires a balance.” But at the moment, it seems to me that the promotion of gaming dwarfs efforts to curtail the negative aspects.
