Really? Paying someone else a bunch of money to play by the hour seems like a weird way to manage your time. Plus, I knew several people who had a real problem with spending money in cafés.

I mean, it's not gambling because you weren't getting any money back at any point, but if you were leaving your Ultima Online character mining while you went to class, spending money on running a computer when you weren't even looking at it... well, I'm gonna say there are better ways to keep yourself from problematic gaming.

The way I remember it (at least where I'm from), cafés were a way for broke college students living in dorms or shared apartments with no Internet to get into online gaming, and sometimes for kids to have a bit of an arcade experience in PCs better than their crappy laptops.

In some cases it got pretty wholesome, where groups of friends would just hang out in the one place that kept running the game they liked. There was this one basement grungy spot in town that started running Quake 1 and just... never stop. Those guys could railgun you mid-flight from a bouncepad on a ball mouse and we all decided it was better to leave them to it.