Korea's Fathers Once Hid in Arcades. Now Their Children Hide in A.I.
An old pop song from the 1997–98 financial crisis is resurfacing as a map for today's generative-A.I. upheaval — and as a quiet memorial to the men who learned to disappear without leaving home.
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The Arcade as Refuge
In the late 1990s, the light inside a Korean arcade — 오락실 (orak-sil) — was the color of pause. Fluorescent tubes washed the room into a kind of permanent noon. The air was sweet with overheated circuitry and cheap snacks. And if you lingered long enough, you began to notice something that didn't belong: men in workday clothes who were not, by any logic, at work.
A 1998 hit by the three-sister group Han's Band turned that uneasy sight into a story almost too simple to resist: a schoolgirl ducks into an arcade after flunking a test, only to find her father there — a man she had assumed was in an office, not hunched over a game cabinet, asking for secrecy the way adults ask for mercy. The lyrics are written in a child's register — concrete, guileless, devastating. The "news" inside the song announces what the girl cannot yet name: there are many fathers in arcades in broad daylight.
At the time, listeners understood exactly what the song was pointing at without saying. Korea's financial crisis had cracked open the promise that a diligent life would be rewarded with a stable one. Layoffs and bankruptcies surged; unemployment, once unthinkably low, spiked to levels that remade household atmospheres overnight.
The arcade was not the problem. It was the evidence.
YouTube: Han's Band - "Arcade" (1998)
The Moral Geometry of an Era
The most enduring detail in "Arcade" is not the father playing a game. It is the father asking not to be reported — not to his wife, not to the family narrative that keeps him upright.
That single request captures the moral geometry of an era. In the late 1990s, a man's job was often treated as a household's spine. When the spine broke, the pain was not merely economic; it was symbolic. Many men still left home at the usual hour — suit on, face composed — because staying inside was a kind of confession. What followed was wandering: libraries, parks, cheap diners, bus terminals, and yes, arcades. Places where time could pass without demanding an explanation.
The numbers tell one story: unemployment rising rapidly during the crisis, with Korean institutions and international observers tracking the social shock as it unfolded. But the song tells the more intimate one: a family absorbing macroeconomics as mood.
And it mattered that the observer was a daughter. The lyric's power comes from its reversal of the usual gaze. The father, typically framed as authority, becomes someone seen — and suddenly, someone vulnerable. The daughter, typically framed as dependent, becomes the narrator who recognizes, however dimly, that adults also want to run away from consequences.
In online reminiscence, people who were teenagers then — many now in their 40s and 50s — describe the same late-1990s scene: fathers who became quieter, who smoked more, who watched TV without watching, who carried a new, inexplicable fatigue home. For them, "Arcade" is less a song than a time capsule with a heartbeat.
The New Arcade Has Wi-Fi and a Menu
If the old arcade was a fluorescent waiting room, the new one is better lit, better branded — and often built to feel productive.
Korea's contemporary "arcades" are everywhere: PC 방 (PC bang) that have evolved into hybrid lounges; "quiet cafés" where technology companies invite you to sip coffee while you use their A.I. tools; the frictionless, always-open portal of a chat interface that will draft your report, rewrite your apology, outline your dissertation, or generate a résumé that sounds like the person you wish you were.
Consider one scene from 2025 that almost reads like satire: Perplexity, an A.I. search company, opened an A.I.-themed café in Seoul's affluent Gangnam area — a place where curiosity is packaged with espresso, and the product is not only software but a mood: calm, modern, frictionless.
Or consider the way PC bangs keep mutating. They are no longer simply gaming dens; they are rest areas, snack halls, private cubicles for an exhausted city — now even flirtation and companionship are being layered in, via A.I. "boyfriends" and other synthetic social experiences.
On the surface, these places are the opposite of the 1998 arcade. They are not shabby. They are not shameful. They are designed to look like the future.
Yet they serve a similar psychological function: they offer a third space where people can postpone the hardest conversation of modern life — the one about whether they still have a role.
A.I. as the Second IMF, Minus the Sirens
The analogy is imperfect, and that matters. The IMF (International Monetary Fund) crisis was a sudden rupture: a dramatic "before and after" with a clear villain (a collapsing financial system) and visible victims (the newly unemployed). The A.I. transition is quieter, more dispersed. It arrives as "efficiency," "innovation," "assistants," "agents." It can feel like improvement — right up until it feels like replacement.
Korea is moving quickly. Surveys and reports in recent years have found high levels of experimentation with generative A.I. at work, alongside uneven access to training and widening gaps between executives' enthusiasm and employees' lived realities.
And the emotional ambivalence is striking. In late 2025, Korean polling captured a familiar double vision: anxiety that A.I. will deepen inequality and take jobs, paired with hope that it will reduce working hours and improve life.
In early 2026, a poll reported that workers using generative A.I. saw substantial reductions in work hours — a benefit that can sound like liberation, or like the first hint of redundancy, depending on who is listening.
This is the strange new bargain: A.I. gives time back — and asks what you are for.
Researchers studying workplaces have been tracing the psychological underside of that bargain. When A.I. is introduced as a managerial tool, job insecurity can rise, and with it distress — unless institutions buffer the impact with credible support, training and trust.
In other words: the technology is not destiny. The way companies and governments narrate the transition determines whether A.I. becomes an assistant or a threat — whether it feels like opportunity or humiliation.
Why Arcades Keep Returning in Times of Upheaval
An arcade is more than entertainment. It is a social device. It offers structured uncertainty: clear rules, measurable progress, the possibility of winning — a seductive contrast to real life during transformation, when rules are rewritten mid-game and the scoreboard belongs to someone else.
In 1998, the arcade gave displaced fathers an illusion of competence — a place where skill still mattered, and failure was not permanent. In 2026, A.I. offers a parallel illusion: a frictionless performance of capability. You can ask for a strategy, a pitch, a paragraph, a plan. You can look fluent, even if you feel lost.
But there is also tenderness in this recurrence. A person does not seek an arcade when life is stable. They seek it when stability has become a rumor.
That is why "Arcade" lands differently now, especially for those who have become the age their fathers were. The song's father is not a caricature. He is a man trying to preserve a household's narrative by editing his own humiliation out of it. That instinct — to protect your family by protecting your image — is precisely what later generations inherit.
What changes in the 2026 listening is not the father's behavior, but the listener's moral eyesight.
When you are a child, you interpret the father in the arcade as a puzzle. When you are an adult, you recognize the arcade as a strategy: a small, temporary shelter built out of bright screens.
The Fathers We Remember, and the Country We're Becoming
The most modern thing about Han's Band's "Arcade" is its refusal to mock. It treats the father not as a failed patriarch but as a human being caught inside a system's recalculation.
That sensibility may be exactly what an A.I. society needs.
Because the most dangerous story we can tell about the A.I. transition is a moral one: that the people who struggle simply didn't try hard enough, didn't learn fast enough, didn't "upskill." That story feels efficient — and it is quietly cruel.
Korea's government, like others, is beginning to formalize the rules of the new era. In January, the country implemented a sweeping A.I. framework aimed at safety and trust, including requirements for oversight and labeling in high-impact uses — an attempt to regulate A.I. not as a novelty, but as infrastructure.
But regulation alone cannot solve what the song understood: transition is also emotional. A father in an arcade is not only a labor-market statistic. He is a person negotiating shame, identity and family.
That negotiation will return — now in different offices, different industries, different ages. And it will be met, again, by children who sense something is wrong before they can name it.
In 1998, a pop song captured that sensing. In 2026, its quiet question still hangs in the air, updated by new light:
When the economy changes the rules, where do people go to feel whole — and who is waiting there to recognize them?
References
Han's Band. "Arcade." 1998. Performance-era commentary and cultural analysis.
International Monetary Fund. Korea Financial Crisis (1997-1998). Historical labor shock and unemployment data.
Korean Ministry of Science and ICT. "A.I. Adoption and Job Anxiety Survey." 2025-2026.
Perplexity AI. "Curious: A.I. Café." Seoul, Gangnam. 2025.
Korea's A.I. Regulatory Framework. January 2026. Safety, trust, and oversight requirements.
