March 13, 2007
Okay, so GP is a sucker for a gadget story...The Korea Times reports on a company which claims to have developed an inaudible sound sequence that can be used to make obsessive online gamers step away from their PCs.
Yun Yun-hae, president of Xtive, told the Korea Times that the concept is based on subliminal messages:
We incorporated messages into an acoustic sound wave telling gamers to stop playing. The messages are told 10,000 to 20,000 times per second. Game users can't recognize the sounds. But their subconscious is aware of them and the chances are high they will quit playing.
Korea is one of several countries where officials are concerned about online gaming addiction.
Our newly developed sound sequence tells (adolescents) to stop playing on their own. We think this can make a real difference in the war against obsessive game play.
It appears that the Xtive audio sequence would need to be licensed by online game companies. Yun has plans to discuss the concept with Korean game companies as well as the government. He sees applications for the subliminal message system which extend beyond gaming.
Game companies can install a system, which delivers the inaudible sounds after it recognizes a young user has kept playing after a preset period of time... We can easily change the messages. In this sense, the potential for this technology is exponential.
Although its effectiveness remains unclear, subliminal advertising has been banned in several countries for decades.
Comments
Sounds like it would be repeated so fast, it would just make a high-pitched squeal of noise. Which I'm sure is much more annoying than just popping up a message saying "hey get off!"
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When I was younger, my mom would also repeat the same message over and over, apparently at a frequency I couldnt comprehend... because I didn't hear her. I'd imagine this little program will have the same efficacy.
Pseudoscience at its best!
Wha? Even if the "messages" consist of nothing more than a single "click", that's still in the extreme upper range of most people's hearing. If the message actually were to contain any information (which would seem to be a necessity to achieve the claimed effect), compressing it to be broadcast 10,000 times a second would put it way out of reach of any kind of actual perception.
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Where the heck are the parents? Is it too much trouble to keep track of how long your kid has been playing, and then -stop them from playing too long-? Use a watch, for crying out loud.
Not to mention the moral implications, who are, hopefully, really obvious.
Well, don't do that. I actualy got tested, and i had the feeling to stop and get up. So i got up, i went to the dinning room, and i suddently got the feeling to play again. I re-played, and it was fun, but borring at same time... But this is a good way to stop playing.
I'm 16 and I'm a game addict help me I'm CrAzY! @.@!?
http://iloblog.stics.se/yard?Home&post=2
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Game addiction is just an addiction among all other addictions and should be treated in that way in order to combat it.
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