I Appreciate Bethsaida Lopez's Concern About Online Gaming Addiction Among Filipino Youth

I was thinking about "It's about time." when it comes to someone who's actually thinking -- or not! Senatorial candidate Bethsaida Lopez has launched her plan to actually ban online gaming among students. I'm actually pretty fine with it for this reason considering that too much time is wasted playing online! Students should be going to the Internet cafe to do research and NOT to play online games. She has raised some very valid concerns which I would actually support her move but I don't think she's going to get supported by today's bobotantes.

I could really remember back on my College days and it's really frustrating. I remembered how often I wanted to call my groupmates to meet so the project can be done on time and what do they do? They were too busy playing online games aside from their obsession with stupid teleseryes. I remembered if they weren't too busy watching teleseryes then they were too busy playing Defense of the Ancients -- as if it's way more important than their group work.

Lopez raises some proper concerns such as how stressful it must be for parents to work hard and the children don't go to school. Some even cut classes to play online games rather than attend their classes. Worse, I even remembered how I had a classmate in college who would complain about the inflation yet she has no qualms about spending more than half a day in the Internet cafe. Worse, there's even high schoolers who are going home late all because of spending overtime with online gaming at the Internet cafe. They should be at home studying and doing their homework instead of spending too much time at the Internet cafe.

Now the question for Lopez is that she should consider measures and not band-aid solutions on how to control these problems. I remembered how an Internet cafe near the local university wouldn't allow high school students to enter during school hours. Both high school and college students were also prohibited from staying too long in there. I think it's more than about time to actually implement strict but reasonable curfew laws to counter the problems that she's raising concerning online gaming addiction. These are but some of the few of the many measures she should consider in her campaign.

At the same time, we should consider that parents should also limit their children's access to online gaming. In short, video game consoles and the desktop PC (and College students wanting a laptop should consider earning their way to buy one) should not be a one for each property but a common property for the whole household. This also means strict discipline such as no computer games on weekdays and only once a week. The lesson is that while technology and modernization are good things but be careful as they can also be misused and abused at the same time.