Images purportedly exhibiting a newly opened public PC gaming area in North Korea have been shared on social media. Technology fanatic Iniysa shared images of a “North Korean PC bang” on X. A ‘PC bang’ interprets as principally a ‘PC room’ and the time period comes from South Korea, the place it’s broadly used to discuss with an ‘internet café’ or ‘electronic café’ the place gaming is the primary exercise. There are 1000’s of PC bangs in South Korea, and so they type a significant a part of the youth tradition under the 38th parallel. However, they aren’t actually a factor within the North, as you may count on.
The contemporary commercial architecture of this new venue is typical of many higher-end developments I have seen in East Asia. If anything, it looks too premium for a place where gamers typically just want to go and sit in the dark, in front of an adequate eSports PC, for a low hourly rate.
A critical thinker might question whether this is a premium showcase venue designed to frame the idea that a modern, advanced gaming culture exists in North Korea. Actually, tech-Twitterer Iniysa reckons that the swish new PC bang is located in “a newly built city in Pyongyang, and only the top elites selected by the state, such as those recognized by Kim Jong-un and nuclear test scientists, are allowed to live there.”
Also, while one might expect North Korean PC gamers to live by Chinese tech hand-me-downs, Iniysa is openly surprised to see premium Asus ROG-branded gear at this Pyongyang PC bang.
Images of what appears to be the net café games UI are also somewhat eyebrow-raising. The machine translation of the grid-layout game launcher banner is ‘Mars Computer Arcade’, which we haven’t heard of before. However, it features many AAA and eSports titles that are popular on the other side of the DMZ.
Without much pixel peeping, we can see the iconic covers of games from franchises like FIFA, Battlefield, Call of Duty, Rainbow Six, Crysis, Far Cry, and others. Iniysa chirps up to suggest that, while these games may be accessible in the Pyongyang PC bang, they will most likely be restricted to local – probably internal – networks. Thus, the North Korean bamboo curtain persists, even in the gaming sphere.
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