"What feeds our business is that most parents don't allow their children to do PC gaming at home — they are supposed to be studying," Mr. Kim said briskly. "So what lots of kids will do is pop in after school and spend three or four hours playing. If their parents ask, they'll tell them they were somewhere else." Gender gap:

Sure enough, sitting at row after row of computer screens were dozens of school-age boys, their mouths agape, their desktops cluttered with cellphones, greasy fast-food snacks and bucket-sized sodas. As they teamed up, using separate consoles to take on the forces of evil in popular shoot-em games like Strike Force, Starcraft and Mu, some of them could be said to be engaging in group activity, but just barely. Utterances like "quick, shoot!," or "look out," or especially, "attack!" seemed about the extent of it.

The young women who came to the club with their girlfriends seemed every bit as locked into a parallel universe as the young men, albeit an entirely different universe. Although there is no enforced gender separation at the PC bangs, girls who were not on dates tended to gravitate toward the banks of computers equipped with small cameras atop the monitors.

For hours, many of them practiced shooting pictures of themselves in playful, smiley poses, composing them with flowers and slogans and clip art and sending them off as digital postcards to real, imagined or would-be friends.

Is this better or worse than a generation of TV zombies? On the one hand you might think the "interactivity" of the games make them preferable to the passivity of TV; but conversely, at least when you are watching TV you can do other things, like play video games.