For this episode of Korean Next Door, we spent a day with Park Young-seo, a manager at a "PC bang," or internet cafe, in Seoul's Jongno District. When she graduated from high school and decided it was time to find a job, the PC bang was the first thing that came to mind — she had loved games since she was a kid, so the logic was airtight. At 22, she became a manager at the Red Force PC bang in Jongno, a joint venture between Nongshim and BNM Company.
Follow her through a shift and a few things become clear. The first is the food. This PC bang offers roughly 100 items counting drinks, and the manager is the one cooking all of it and carrying it out to the floor.
The second is the hardware. These are close to the best consumer rigs money can buy, and here they rent for less than $2 an hour.
There's a history behind that math. When Korea's economy collapsed in the late 1990s, the government bet its recovery on infrastructure and poured money into a nationwide broadband network. The country came out the other side of that crisis wired for some of the fastest internet on Earth. It arrived at exactly the moment StarCraft swept Korea. Star pro gamers became household names, "pro gamer" topped the list of what elementary schoolers wanted to be when they grew up, and the PC bang became the hottest business anyone could open. At the peak, 20,000 of them were operating across the country.
That kind of competition is what shaped the Korean PC bang into what it is now: better food, better machines, always. Park's PC bang pushes it further. Because it's run by the esports club Nongshim RedForce, it also promotes esports teams and keeps an event space two floors belowground where those teams can hold their own gatherings.
Manager Park cooks, cleans the stations and doubles as the resident technician. Before this job, she didn't know much about computers and couldn't really cook; now she can do both, and she knows the machines cold. There's a side benefit, too. Given the working conditions — unlimited access to a top-tier computer — her League of Legends rank has climbed to Platinum. The night-shift guy, she told us with a grin, is Master.
Want to see the rest of her day? Watch the full video here.