By Ever wonder who those people are that fill Korea’s Internet Cafes? Well here is an interesting article explaining who these gamers are:
Many of South Korea’s 17 million gamers — some 35 percent of the population, principally males in their teens and twenties — are obsessive. At the 1,000 won-per-hour ($1) Internet cafes popular among young South Koreans, they’ll sit eyes glued to monitors for hours on end. Sometimes play will extend for days.
“I’ve seen people who play games for months, just briefly going home for a change of clothing, taking care of all their eating and sleeping here,” Jun said.
Gamers camped out at Internet cafes typically live on instant cup noodles and cigarettes, barely sleeping and seldom washing.
My first tour in Korea Camp Casey did not have on post Internet access in the barracks so I always had to go to the off post Internet Cafes and I was always amazed by the fact that I would go to the Internet cafe in the afternoon and then come back some time the next morning and the same Korean youths wearing the same clothes sitting at the same computer would still be sitting there playing the same game. Hopefully the guys I saw didn’t end up like this:
This year’s gaming death wasn’t the first such case of someone dying at a computer terminal in this game-crazed nation: In 2002, a man died in Kwangju after 86 hours of marathon gaming.
The latest casualty collapsed Aug. 5 in the southern city of Daegu after having eaten minimally and not sleeping.
Doctors said they presumed he died of heart failure; no autopsy was performed. So obsessed by gaming was the man that he was reported to have lost his office worker job due to absenteeism.
“Such an addiction upsets the foundation of your life,” said Kim Kyung-bin, a Seoul psychiatrist who counsels gaming addicts.
One of Kim’s patients, a high school student, would leave his house and not come back for weeks, practically living in Internet cafes playing games, Kim said.
However, some of these game addicts are making big money off of their addiction or hobby depending on how you want to characterize it:
Computer games can also be a path to big rewards. Three cable channels are devoted to broadcasting game matches and a total of 4.5 billion won ($4.4 million) is given out as prize money in competitions each year.
Even the government is embracing electronic sports, or “E-sports,” funding construction of the world’s first e-sports stadium, to be completed by 2008, where online competitions will be displayed on huge screens.
Hong Jin-ho, a 24-year-old professional gamer, earns more than 133 million won ($130,000) a year, living and training with his fellow game team members in an apartment in central Seoul.
I play strategy games like Civilization III and Rise of Nations every once in a while and they can be addicting, but 50 hour game marathons? I can go maybe 4 hours before my eyes get worn out. It makes me wonder if the amount of these Internet cafe addicts is directly related to youth unemployment in Korea? I guess if you have nothing better to dom the Internet cafes are an inexpensive entertainment option to fill your day up with, or in the case of some these gamers, fill your weeks up with.
