'Games, son? Why can't you just smoke like other kids?'

By Kim Tong-hyung

Here's your midweek update on the stories in entertainment and media you might have missed because your life is a lot more fulfilling than ours. (Yes, we are reviving this column from the dead. Umm, yeah, it wasn't there for more than a month.)

She probably grew up without a Sega

Shin Eui-jin, a doctor-turned-lawmaker for the governing Saenuri Party, leads a growing group of conservative legislators pushing for tougher laws on controlling gaming habits.

Shin claims that video games are pathologically addictive as booze, drugs and gambling. She groups these behaviors as the main targets for her imaginary National Addiction Control Committee, which she recommends as a unit of the Prime Minister's Office.

Shin is essentially saying that teenagers slaying aliens on computer servers are a more alarming danger than their peers lighting up cigarettes, which were left off her list for reasons only she could understand.

Game companies complain that Shin's arguments run against the limits of acceptability. They have the support of some opposition lawmakers, including Democratic Party's Jeon Byeong-heon, also the chairman of the Korea e-Sports Association, who in a blog post on Monday called Shin a ''kkondae,'' a derogatory term for an outdated person.

Perhaps it matters more than Shin appears to have the support of Korea's famously overzealous parents, who want their kids to just put the darn mouse down and download English words to their brains 24/7.

Korea is one of the global centers of the expanding market of ''online'' video games played on servers instead of consoles. It's also where game addiction is an increasing social problem and as a result policymakers are caught between promoting games as an industry and limiting its use. The law already prevents gamers under the age of 16 from playing between midnight and 6 a.m., but youngsters seem to find it easy to bypass the restraints.

There's no denying that compulsive gaming warrants concern. But it also feels like politicians like Shin are attacking the symptoms vigorously to make up for avoiding the disease.

Games are a rare outlet for students who are thrown into a rat race of exams from a young age under Korea's severely hierarchical education system. Their unhealthy gaming habits may have more to do with their unhealthy environment than the addictiveness of them games themselves.

It's hard to imagine that Korean youngsters would be this attached to games if the country had better public infrastructure for sports and leisure. But it's not that parents would be happier if their kids were playing football and basketball instead of games when these activities are just as irrelevant to test scores, which are definitely the biggest addiction of them all.

Did Ailee have the worst boyfriend ever?

Ailee

The Internet was rocked Monday morning after topless photos of singer Ailee were leaked.

The source of the pictures, taken sometime before the 24-year-old Korean-American debuted in Korea last year, may or may not have been Daniel Lee, her ex-boyfriend and employee of website All K-Pop. Interestingly, All K-Pop was the first news site to report on the leaked photos.

The suspicions surrounding Lee and All K-Pop were touched off by a report by news site Dispatch, which released the details of a phone conversation it had in July with a man who claimed to be Ailee's ex-boyfriend.

He said he had nude photos of a pre-debut Ailee and wondered whether Dispatch was interested in paying for them. Dispatch turned down the offer and the man claimed he was capable of selling the photos to a different media outlet, the article said.

Later on Monday, YMC Entertainment, Ailee's agency, released an official statement that the woman in the photo was indeed Ailee. She took the photos when she was living in the United States, in belief that she was applying to model for an American lingerie company, YMC said.

After learning she was the victim of a scam, Ailee reported the incident to the police and consulted her then-boyfriend, who insisted he needed to see the photos to offer her ''accurate'' advice. YMC says it will prepare legal action against the person who leaked the photos.

This was followed by a statement by All K-Pop, which denied the accusations raised by YMC Entertainment. The website said it was also contacted by an individual who wanted to sell his set of ''Ailee Nude Scandal Pictures'' for $3,500 in cash.

''At this time, we stated that we were not interested, and this person said he would contact another agency,'' All K-Pop said in a statement.

''For full disclosure, our employee, Daniel Lee did date Ailee in the past. However, he did not post the photos in question. Not knowing who the true culprit was, YMC turned the blame to the easiest target.''

In the story about Ailee's photos, All K-Pop led its article with ''an anonymous website and forums has uploaded several photos potentially depicting K-Pop star Ailee in revealing attire.''

Whoever attempted to sell those photos to Korean media companies is a blithering idiot in addition to being a scumbag. This isn't America. The entertainment market here is much smaller and even large showbiz news companies like Dispatch barely survive by being trolls for clicks. Paying cash for exclusive, explicit photos is too luxurious of a business model for them.