With his eyes fixed on the screen and his fingers flying over the keyboard, Cambodian teenager An Sopheak is lost in a world of ancient Chinese fighter heroes.
All around him, dozens of other, mostly male, faces are equally engrossed in their online fantasy game in this dark Internet cafe in the Cambodian capital.
The scene is a familiar one across Asia, but it's a relatively new sight in Cambodia, one of the region's poorest nations with one of the lowest rates of Internet usage.
"I feel so cool when my hero gets stronger," said 16-year-old An Sopheak, taking a short break from Justice X Wars II, known as JXII, the country's most popular game.
Cambodia, with a population of some 14 million people, had just 78,000 Internet users in 2009, according to the most recent United Nations data, but web access is improving rapidly.
As more Internet cafes have opened up, online gaming has taken off among Cambodia's urban teens, most of whom have no Internet at home.
