USAN, South Korea, Oct. 3 — Throughout the year they have been dating, Jang Min Ji and Jung Tae Kyun have met almost every afternoon at online video game clubs, where they while away the hours zapping bad guys, dodging flame-breathing monsters or playing cards against anonymous strangers.

The action is so fast and furious at the RA PC Zone, their favorite meeting spot among the thousands of game rooms here, that they have almost no time to talk. Ensconced side by side in their gamers' loveseats, the college couple murmur and coo mostly news of their latest electronic triumphs and defeats, their words barely audible over the hail of gunfire, the grunts and screams of combatants and generalized whirring and clanging.

Advertisement

Only when they finally emerge from the pall of smoke and cathode ray blues and reds of the club lights will they finally chat. So what do they talk about? "Mostly about games," said Ms. Jang, a slightly guilty smile playing on her face as her puppy, Urami, strained in her lap, where it had spent the afternoon in confinement. Mr. Jung never broke his gaze on the screen.

With the largest high-speed Internet market penetration in the world, South Korea has seen the broadband future that has stalled in so many other places.

More than half of all Korean households have high-speed Internet connections — compared with fewer than 10 percent in the United States — and the exploding Web culture has driven economic growth and spawned civic movements that have powerfully affected everything from politics to consumer culture.

But more and more these days, people are emphasizing a darker side to this technological success story.

Broadband's killer application — the one activity that dwarfs all others — is online gaming, which 80 percent of South Koreans under 25 play, according to one recent study. Critics say the burgeoning industry is creating millions of zombified addicts who are turning on and tuning into computer games, and dropping out of school and traditional group activities, becoming uncommunicative and even violent because of the electronic games they play.

"Game players don't have normal social relationships anymore," said Kim Hyun Soo, a 36-year-old psychiatrist who is chairman of the Net Addiction Treatment Center, one of many groups that have sprung up to cope with Internet game addiction. "Young people are losing the ability to relate to others, except through games. People who become addicted are prone to violence, even when they are not playing.

"They clash in the games, and then they meet later and fight face to face."

Far more than the United States, South Korea is a group-oriented society, where socializing in bunches is the preferred form of interaction, and Western-style individualism is frowned upon. Critics say this has been the secret to the tidal wave of online gaming, and the psychiatrist says it is the key to understanding its profound impact.

"Very few of our customers come alone," said Kim Gi Beum, the 29-year-old owner of the RA PC Zone, reputedly the largest of Pusan's thousands of game rooms, or PC bangs, as they are known here. "Of course they could play at home, but it is more exciting to be surrounded by other gamers, especially if they are your friends."

Mr. Kim started his business three years ago, during the the fallout from the Asian economic crisis, with a $50,000 investment. He had worked a variety of jobs through college to save money for this dream. Now, he said, he pulls 1,200 players a day into this shop, where gamers pay $10 an hour to beat online strangers and wipe out aliens. With similar numbers of players flocking to the other 13 PC bangs in his expanding empire, nowadays he is plowing his profits into trying to start his own online game, which he has evocatively named History of Chaos.

"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."

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.

Although there was little sign of it on this day, some parents' groups have complained that the PC bangs are turning into pickup joints, where teenagers swap pictures electronically and decide whether or not to meet. Reversing the usual pattern in a male-dominated society, the girls are reportedly in charge in this game, tipping desired suitors as to the club and even the seat where they can be found.

Rather than communing, meanwhile, many of those who have arrived on dates have devised ways of setting up invisible walls.

Back Myung Hee, a 24-year-old insurance company employee, appeared to be perfectly alone as she browsed through catalogs online, looking at fall outfits and makeup, which she insisted was cheaper and more convenient than going to the mall.

Asked why she had come alone, she arched her eyebrows and swiveled her chair nearly 180 degrees and repeated, "Alone? I'm with him," pointing to a man in the next chair who was close to oblivious, so locked was he into his online struggle between good and evil. "I want him to enjoy himself, so I don't talk when he's gaming."