게임셧다운제 및 게임실명제 헌재결정에 대한 평석- 게임이용자 권리 인정의 필요성

Abstract

The constitutional court’s recent decisions on Game Shutdown Law and Game Real Name Law suffer from a failure to recognize the gamers’ right to play the games as part of the constitutional right to access to information and the consequently low standards of review. Therefore, the court accepted without much scrutiny the excessive means of achieving ‘protection of sleep hours’ in the arbitrarily set time period between 12 midnight and 6 o’clock in the morning’ despite its obvious defects vis-a-vis minimality of infringement and efficiency of means. Once the game shutdown has been justified, the Game Real Name Law was easily justified as necessary to operationalize the Game Shutdown Law which requires age verification and therefore needs the real name check, losing the last opportunity to give proper weight to the gamer’s access right to games. Access to game is no less access to information like reading a book which has been recognized as part of “the right to knowledge” in the Subversive Book Banning case. If reading a book has been given such status even in the power relationship built around the military bases, access to game in the relatively open online space should be of course given the same status and be reviewed under a strict scrutiny. If so, the game shutdown law could be revisited and compared to the Constitutional Court’s own Internet name law decision and the billiard hall decision and critiqued upon its excessiveness in a sense that its goal of preventing sleep deprivation or game addition could be met by less intrusive means targeting high-risk users or controlling only the total game time instead of banning the gaming entirely in certain hours, and also in a sense that it does not recognize exemptions based on authorizations by parents or health professionals. The game real name law, justified mostly as the means for effectuating the shutdown law, can also be revisited and re-evaluated in comparison to the Court’s previous decisions on Internet real name law.