Oppose It No Matter What!
No matter what it is, I oppose it! Abolish it anyway! Condemn anything and everything! After yet another all-nighter, I was sipping on instant coffee when I stepped out to grab the newspaper and nearly dropped my mug. Anyone would have. From the crack of dawn, an ever-growing army of aunties was assembling in front of our arcade.
What the hell is this?
The panic I felt was second only to the day the Agency came to arrest me. Then the aunties sat down in the middle of the sidewalk and unfurled their placards, and I was genuinely horrified.
STUDENTS’ RUINOUS DELINQUENT ARCADE — STOP THE DEVIL’S TEMPTATION!
“Ah, shit.”
Only then did I realize it. I was fucked. The arcade was fucked.
They were occupying the road, so not only was passage blocked, but no one could even get close to the arcade. The one saving grace was that we’d kept the doors locked. If we’d left them open, they probably would have occupied the inside too.
When Yoo-seop came out from the PC bang still half-asleep, watching his consciousness snap back to reality in real time was a strangely fascinating experience.
“We should report this as business obstruction first. What the hell even is…”
Yoo-seop’s narrowed eyes clearly showed the complicated emotions running through him. But the protest wasn’t dispersed.
“The demonstration was properly reported in advance and there are no violations of the Assembly and Demonstration Act. If you interfere with it, you’ll be the one punished.”
“Excuse me? They’re openly obstructing our business right in front of us and you’re just going to let it happen?!”
“The protest location has been acknowledged as coincidentally being in front of the arcade. It’s not like the arcade will go under if it stays closed for one day, right? They’ll disperse after sunset, so just wait until then.”
Civil servants in this country weren’t exactly a trustworthy bunch, and police officers were no different.
It was suffocating. Everything around me seemed determined to get in my way. My atheistic worldview hardened once again, and everything in my head was painted over in black.
Everything is cause and effect. So did my own actions create this chain of events? What if I had quietly made computer games? What if the arcade hadn’t become popular enough to spark controversy? What if I had waited patiently until games became mainstream culture? What if I had completely destroyed them in the debate?
The thoughts connected endlessly, wrapping around me like ropes, like a leash dragging me down into a bottomless pit with no end in sight.
The protest continued. The sun in January felt unbearably long. Yoo-seop, unable to watch any longer, eventually went out despite knowing he might face punishment.
“This is business obstruction! At least clear a path so people can get inside!”
“We can’t let kids go into a place like this! Are you going to take responsibility if our children become gambling addicts?”
“Where the hell is the gambling?! That’s complete nonsense…!”
“Pumping money into that thing, bragging to the whole neighborhood about a high score, feeding their vanity—that’s not gambling? Stop trying to ruin our kids and get lost!”
Those fucking idiots. There was nothing scarier than an ignorant person with strong convictions.
Only after the sun had set did the police finally disperse the protesters. Only then could we open the arcade doors and turn on the lights.
“Boss, what the hell was that earlier?”
“I don’t know either… haa…”
Yoo-seop’s sigh sank endlessly through the ground, following the thread of my own thoughts.
The next day, the aunties gathered again. They protested when the sun rose and dispersed when it set. Only then could we open the arcade doors, and whenever the arcade was open, the lights were always on. Despite the perfect conditions—south-facing and large glass windows—we never saw the lights off inside the open arcade.
The day after that. And the day after that. Even on weekends.
They didn’t stop.
The sidewalk in front of the arcade, trampled by their cheap shoes, became especially filthy. The various pieces of trash the protesters left behind created the same ominous, dirty atmosphere as the photo that had first appeared in the newspaper about our arcade.
To them, what it used to be didn’t matter. If they didn’t like something, they simply had to make it so they did. That was the kind of problem this was.
The KIN logo on the arcade sign, slashed diagonally, had lost all meaning. It was now nothing more than a precarious neon sign hanging like those on shuttered stores.
After quite a long time—or perhaps a surprisingly short one—I finally realized it. I had become the one-eyed fool in the village of the blind.
Why did the people of this country—especially mothers—react so extremely to games? Did they think kids would study if they didn’t play games? Shouldn’t they first look at the environment that led to kids playing in the first place?
There were far too many monsters in the world who only saw what they wanted to see, fell into confirmation bias, got swept up in agitation, and eventually couldn’t even look at themselves. Maybe this country itself was one giant hypnotist.
The convictions of ignorant people aren’t noble—they’re harmful obstinacy that hurts everyone. But when that obstinacy gathers, it becomes a phenomenon, then a law, and finally disguises itself as the normal functioning of society.
I had hated those things in my original world, and I hated them in this one too. Dressing game characters in half-naked skins back then had been one form of my rebellion. But did anything change? No. In this society—an enormous mass of path dependence—my small actions only pushed me back with an equal and opposite reaction.
I was feeling despair again. The same despair I had grown sick of in my original world. I thought many things had changed, but nothing had changed at all.
The new semester began. I started the process for graduating in my seventh semester, just as I had planned. I submitted the thesis I had been steadily preparing and packed my credits tightly to meet all the requirements. I had once imagined blasting trance music at the university festival, but that seemed impossible now.
When the sun began to set, lectures ended and I headed to the PC bang. I didn’t feel like running there like I used to, though.
By the time I arrived, the auntie army was packing up and leaving. They never seemed to get tired. Surprisingly, the protests hadn’t hurt our sales that badly. After persistently reporting them for business obstruction while showing our sales records, we managed to keep them from entering the sidewalk area right in front of the store. There had been an incident where a rock flew from some unknown direction and shattered a window, but… well, it was minor enough to shrug off.
Anyway, since our main customers had always been college students, the damage wasn’t severe. They were people already branded as otaku for enjoying games or new types of music, so they were used to society’s stares and criticism. That was fortunate.
Back to what I was saying—once I entered the PC bang, an English class with native speakers taught by Park Seung-hyeop awaited me in one corner. Native speakers? Well, technically it was his foreign friend who appeared via video call. Apparently they met while Park Seung-hyeop was an exchange student. When Seung-hyeop told him about the prototype video call program, the friend immediately agreed and started teaching like this.
It seemed like a service with real potential, so we were testing it out, and the results weren’t bad. If done right, a video tutoring service like this could be huge. Come to think of it, online lectures were probably due to appear around now too.
After the three-hour English class, I finally scarfed down dinner. Honestly, since the arcade was making quite a lot of money, I could afford proper meals instead of instant food without worrying about my wallet. Still, old habits die hard, and people tend to live frugally. If the arcade went under, I’d be out on the street, so it was better to save as much as possible and watch the situation.
I wasn’t moving much and only eating, so I thought I’d gain a lot of weight, but strangely it wasn’t increasing that dramatically. If anything, it felt like only my chest was growing. Lately my bras felt a little tight.
Anyway, I was living quite diligently. At this rate, I could easily land a job at a big company and cruise down the road to success. It sounded like a flag, but what could possibly happen? Nah.
That said, I’d been getting an insane amount of spam emails lately. Office rentals, scouting offers, and so on. Of course, the contract conditions were obviously scams to anyone with eyes, so I dumped them all in the trash. Honestly, if the terms had been even slightly normal, I probably would have believed it was a real scouting offer and signed without realizing it was a scam. Getting hired by a major foreign company was my grand dream in both my original world and this one. Well, at least I didn’t fall for it.
At that very moment, in the leading corporations of Silicon Valley.
Obviously, Yoon I-seo’s technical prowess had already reached the level where she could rewrite average contract terms however she wanted and have them approved as-is. Yoon I-seo still didn’t fully understand her own worth. But humans aren’t creatures who realize their own ignorance without external input, and so the daily routine of emails sent across undersea cables from Silicon Valley being dumped into the trash continued without any sign of stopping.
Day after day of not-quite-peaceful routine continued. It was like a time-loop story—every day was the same, and then the same day repeated again. A regular life could be this boring. The peaceful daily rhythm messed with my sense of time, and before I knew it, it was finals.
My graduation thesis had passed, and I had fulfilled all the requirements for graduating in the seventh semester. While preparing my self-introduction letter for job applications, a thought suddenly occurred to me. In this situation, could a big company’s shield really protect me from domestic public opinion? Wouldn’t I end up trapped in a corporate environment and unable to make games? The vision of my only joy disappearing floated before my eyes.
Above all, it wouldn’t be long before both corporations and the country itself would be on the brink of collapse. The phrase “If we don’t get a bailout, the country will be destroyed!!!” was about to become reality. Therefore, starting my own company was also impossible. There was no point in burning through all my capital.
“As expected, the answer is to go abroad…”
In truth, I could go if I wanted to. If I sold all my real estate and stocks, I’d have enough to cover permanent residency application fees, plane tickets, and even buy a house in the suburbs. At this point, I seriously needed to consider immigration. It was literally my lifeline.
After finishing my exam while having these rather serious thoughts about the future, I walked back with a sense of liberation. Yet even as I felt refreshed, something still felt strangely off. In the distance, I could see smoke rising from a bonfire on a deserted island.
The arcade gate that had lasted a full two years was finally racing toward its end.