Snippets of cyber role plays allegedly written by teenage students. Sources inform their story lines usually deliver much more explicit depiction than what are shown above. / JoongAng Ilbo



By Ko Dong-hwan

Cyber role-play has become a popular way for Korean teens to make up their own explicit sexual and violent stories.

It seems that multiple playwrights are simultaneously writing for a single play that has the most far-fetched, R-rated-type storylines.

For example, one plot has a delinquent student caught smoking on the school roof. Soon the student and the teacher are having sex.

Another plot describes a group of homosexual school goons cornering a student inside a storage room and raping him. Or, a famous cartoon character is glorified as he kills himself by falling off a school roof in the most blissful, romanticized manner.

Cyber role-play is accessible through blogs that can be found through Korean search engines such as Naver and Daum. There are 3,520 related blogs on Naver and 351 blogs on Daum. The largest blog has about 6,000 registered members.

"I understand that cyber role play has been a way for teens to relieve stress," said a blog member, 29, who has been involved for 10 years. "But the way these kids write stuff . . . they have definitely gone overboard.

"They know a lot better about adult sex toys than I do."

Not only are the blogs accessible on PCs, they can also be accessed from cell phones, allowing teens to participate through instant messaging tools like KakaoTalk or Tictoc.

"I do cyber role plays for about seven to nine hours a day, except when I am at school or sleeping," said Choi, 16, a female high school student.

Another female high school student, Kim, 17, said, "Because I go to a boarding school where cell phones are prohibited, I spend whole Saturdays at cyber role play and sleep throughout the next day."

The students do not worry about how their explicit rhetoric may appear to the others, because they know that only strangers are involved.

Cyber role-play has already shown that it influences teens to commit social crimes, experts say.

"Students are far more likely than adults to confuse cyberspace and reality," said Lee Hyun-ah, a psychologist at Pungnap Middle School.

"Those who depict suicide scenes with particularly vivid details are more likely to commit suicide themselves."

"Cyber role play is a twisted aspect of today's society created by students trying to forget their worries," said socio-psychology Prof. Lee Myeong-hwa from Sookmyung Women's University.

"It has been fueled by the anonymous nature of the Internet culture."