Short Sighted Stupidity: Thailand Orders Shut Down of Game Websites Following Boy's Suicide

Courts in Thailand have ordered the closure of 72 online gambling and gaming websites after a 12 year old boy was alleged to have leaped to his death from the balcony of his family's sixth floor flat after being grounded by his father from playing online games.

According to Kotaku's write-up, the boy's decision to take his life included the causes: "Family problems topped the list. Other factors included physical and mental problems, economic hardships, poor income and unemployment."

As both suicide and unemployment rates continue to rise in the country, the Thai government is under pressure from the public to come up with solutions. Unable to do so, video games have become an easy scapegoat for the government to blame the nation's problems on.

The Bangkok Post writes that the Director at the Rajanagarindra Child and Adolescent Mental Health Institute stated that the boy's addiction to games reflected that children who were addicted to games had an aggressive mentality and were more likely to commit suicide than others. He did not offer any evidence or sources to back up this assertion.

I would postulate that games, like every other form of entertainment, offer an escape from the mundane. To these troubled individuals in Thailand, whose families suffer from insurmountable hardships, games can be the only escape to which they are familiar. Good sense would dictate that depriving people of the entertainment they require to go on living happily is simply going to make life that much more difficult for them.

In contrast to Thailand, South Korea, which similarly suffered from high unemployment rates and suicides in the late 90s after the collapse of the Asian economy, encouraged its citizens to play online games like Lineage, Starcraft and Diablo. The popularity of these games created an industry of PC Bangs (LAN centers) which managed to help revitalize the economy, as it encouraged people to spend money on these forms of entertainment. Many now-successful Korean video game publishers and development studios saw their start during this period of economic growth due to the popularity of video games within the nation, but I threaten to digress.

Simply put, it is clear to see that Thailand's government is taking the wrong approach in all of this. I believe that the boy's suicide is not an issue of game addiction, but rather one of sensory deprivation.

I may personally disapprove of World of Warcraft and the debilitating effects it may have on an individual's life, but I sternly believe that, by and large, games can only help to heal--not hurt. With the right approach, games can not only help to make person's life better, but that they can also help to repair a country's struggling economy.