Question: ‘Arrange Korea’s representative culture contents in the order of the amount exported!’ This question, which has 4 items(games, music, movies and books), came up on the TV quiz contest ‘100 Million Quiz Show’. Most people thought K-Pop is number one. Therefore, people put music in front of the other items, followed by movies, games and books. However, this answer was wrong. The question’s answer was games(2.787 billion dollars), books(265 million dollars), music(235 million dollars) and movies(29 million dollars).
  However, Korea ignores and oppresses the gaming industry with policies like a ‘shutdown system’ and a ‘cooling off’. In addition, Hwang Woo-yea, who is Saenuri Party’s Chairman, said on October 7, “A middle school student killed his mother because of game addiction. I will regard games as poisonous substances like gambling, drugs and alcohol and regulate them.” This decision is a half-baked idea because the correlation between games and violence inclination is not clearly known, and the games have positive effects as well in many different fields. Daphne Maurer(professor of McMaster University in Canada) released a study which shows FPS games can improve symptoms of patients who were born with cataracts. Besides, some people restored their confidence and others succeeded in dieting through computer games. However, it seems that the Korean government only sees the game’s negative aspects and prevents the growth of the gaming industry.
  On the other hand, K-pop gets a lot of support from the Korean government. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism(MCST) made an agreement with Google Korea to promote the culture contents industry in 2011. Under this agreement, the two groups have provided assistance for holding K-pop concerts, and they added a K-pop menu item to raise K-pop’s international profile on YouTube music categories. Furthermore, MCST has announced a plan to establish concert halls for K-pop groups.
  It might be natural that K-pop is supported by the government because the music culture has growth potential. However, why is the government discouraging the gaming industry’s growth? Moreover, the excessive regulations by the Korean government already led to a downturn of an industry. Since the government regulated violent comics to eradicate school violence, the whole comic industry has been declining due to the policy. It should be noted that creativeness and competitiveness cannot be contained under excessive government regulations.