South Korean Baby Dies as Parents Tend to Virtual Daughter
Gaming & Culture —
Dear Child review: The human toll of Internet habit in Korea
HBO's latest documentary reveals the dark side of Korea'due south tech and Internet boom.
HBO Films
The premise of Love Kid, HBO's latest feature-length documentary, doesn't leave much room for moral questions or shades of grey. It opens with the 2010 story of a South Korean couple who met through an online video game, had a child, then neglected it in favor of playing said game. The babe girl died iii months later of malnutrition; the couple found her the morning afterwards they'd spent x hours (their typical session length) at a "PC Blindside" gamer café.
The backwash of that story, especially as it's presented in this film, is pretty cut and dry out: babies skilful, game addiction bad. Thus, this documentary (named after the baby in question, whose name, Sarang, translates to "Love Child") doesn't offer many surprises in perspective. Information technology casts a particularly negative light on the gaming earth and the rapid expansion of Internet access throughout South Korea.
Equally a result, the film'south attempts to humanize its subjects—Kim Jae-beom and his wife Kim Yun-jeong—are uneven and difficult to swallow. To the filmmakers' credit, that choice comes off every bit wholly intentional.Beloved Child paints the couple's story in compassion and sadness as information technology tries to make sense of how gaming, technology, and low combined in a story that, tragically, has become a cornerstone in conversations nigh its nation.
Gold farmer's daughter
The film, which will debut on HBO on Monday, July 28, opened with interview footage of the father, filmed before long later on his initial arrest. Kim said he was being held because his baby had died, but when asked why that happened, he didn't take responsibleness. "I'one thousand not sure. She was a premature baby from the first."
Viewers learn more about the expiry in fits and starts—some TV newsreels, a distraught police officer, the sole journalist at the hearings, the couple's public defender—and the details got worse every step of the way. The wife, denounced past her family for her selection of a much older husband, had to leave home to stay in the relationship. The couple cruel into "gold farming," meaning they by and large played MMO games for a living (gathering virtual coins in games and selling them for real-world currency).
In many ways, the couple's lamentable story boiled down to poverty, similar the mother's malnutrition and inability to go to the hospital at any fourth dimension during the pregnancy. In others, the event was sheer negligence, proven by icky discoveries like rancid milk bottles.
Enlarge / The PC Bang scenes in Dearest Child rarely include fist-pumping or other celebratory stuff, assumedly to Major League Gaming'south chagrin.
HBO Films
The Kim story was ofttimes interspersed with a crash grade in Southward Korea'due south progressive Cyberspace infrastructure. Experts and locals akin spoke at great length near a heavy investment in nationwide broadband and the institution of CDMA networks, simply Dear Child didn't poke through the history department with any talk of leaders or political regimes pushing for that investment. Every bit far as Beloved Child was concerned, someone waved a magic wand and poof: Cyberspace!
But where other news reports and movies tend to movie South korea's most tech-loaded cityscapes, shining and glistening in a sea of screens and neon, Dearest Child pulled the camera dorsum with a stress on long, dull shots. Empty hallways, PC Bang lobbies, shopping malls, skyscrapers, and other scenes filled the screen with a stress on inactivity and even desolation. (Lots of blurry, ho-hum-motion security cam footage appeared, as well, including a disturbing shot of Sarang institute in her parents' apartment. While it was blurred, it was even so incredibly troubling.)
Sometimes, a blast of upbeat G-Pop music played in contrast to a tranquillity or somber scene, just for the most role, the soundtrack sounded as dystopian as the scenes looked—specially the film'southward odd, semi-animated sequences in which people are rendered equally messy bursts of polygons. Assumedly, these were meant to contrast with frequent shots of Prius, the MMORPG that the Kim couple met through and played incessantly.
Reports in 2010 wasted no time in pointing out the central irony of their gaming addiction—namely, that Prius'south quests revolved around taking care of a artless companion, chosen Anima, whose powers and skills would change based on how people played the game. To bulldoze this point dwelling house, Dearest Child includes a few lengthy, unedited game sequences. The about troubling ane sees the Anima sacrificing itself to keep heroes alive, shouting, "I cannot watch you endure!" (Minutes afterwards, the Anima returns to clinch players that she'll come back to life "if you earn enough experience points.")
A unlike kind of shaman
No example like this had come before S Korean courts, and the Kim family unit'due south lawyer managed to successfully argue that this "involuntary manslaughter" was the event of "gaming habit," thus reducing the couple's sentences.
According to Love Child, the Kims were far from lonely in their illness, counting over two million gaming addicts in the nation. After telling usa this—and showing news reports about other deaths attributed to games similar Starcraft—the film walked into a gaming addiction therapy center, where one patient wore 3D spectacles while watching footage that alternated between nature scenes, gaming videos, and "aversive" content total of screams and glass-shattering sounds. "This makes patients have a more than negative mental attitude toward video games," a doctor said, simply the whole affair looked like a half-baked faux of Clockwork Orange.
The movie's perspective on games was far removed from the likes of Video Games: The Movie, showing no rowdy, laugh-filled sessions (with the exception of 1 congratulatory tournament starring Korea's nearly popular competitive game, Starcraft). Instead, rock-faced PC Bang customers stared into monitors while doctors commented on the hobby. One doctor said that video games were comforting for the depressed and those who "lack vigor. They become like a hermit, considering they do non come from a supportive environment."
In fact, but one time were games talked nearly in a incomparably positive light, when a researcher compared Korea's dear of gaming with its religious origins as a shamanistic gild, as both invoke the notion of avatars going on keen quests against evil-doers. This was followed by the story of a tranquil, peaceful online game designed to cheer the parents of children killed at a school's fire: "The game's makers gave all the parents afflicted by this tragedy an avatar of their child. They could take these avatars for walks around these forever peaceful landscapes."
The motion-picture show didn't accept whatsoever answers for what Korea could, or should, do in light of continued gaming-habit stories. Across an official designation of gaming equally an addictive hobby equivalent to vices like tobacco and alcohol, and a curfew restricting children from playing games between the hours of midnight and 6am, most of the film's talking heads had no substantial answers to the problem. The consensus was that more research is necessary. (In a striking moment, staffers at a gaming addiction facility admitted to playing hours of games themselves.)
That fit Love Child'southward "show, don't tell" take on the bailiwick, which meant in spite of the generally sad and somber tone, none of the film's major speakers always denounced online gaming outright. One PC Blindside staffer even became misty-eyed when he recalled the Kim couple falling in love at his shop: "They were so happy lost in this game together."
That willingness to detach and avoid preachiness—and aim a humble, lamentable camera on Korea'due south tech nail, as opposed to a wide-eyed one—was Love Child's saving grace. Its biggest stumble, truly, was that by telling a 2010 story of online gaming, the rise of smartphone games has already changed the nature of how players can consume or become addicted to the hobby. Nevertheless, the flick's tight focus on Southward Korea's rapid tech explosion, and the culture that has awkwardly grown through it, was timeless enough.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/07/love-child-review-the-human-cost-of-internet-addiction-in-korea/
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