Chapter 18: “Blanc New Game”
—I’m trying something new, so I want to look completely different from the usual me.
It was finally time for the open beta test of this highly anticipated game. Normally she wouldn’t be interested, but because she unexpectedly had a huge block of free time, she thought she’d try her hand at VR gaming, which she had always disliked for no real reason. This VR apparatus was normally reserved for healthcare purposes, but it could also be used for other things; she thought she might as well see how it worked for gaming, another reason to do it.
She had heard that this game was revolutionary compared to all the VR games that had come before it. “The game truly brings you to another world,” or so all the famous celebrities claimed.
If she could really live in another world, then she wanted to see how a life completely different from the one she had led up until now played out. With that thought in mind, she declined to let the avatar be generated from a full scan of her body and dove right into the character creator.
“Skeleton… I wonder how that’ll look. Maybe it’ll be cute. I’ll pick that as my race… Whoa, it’s really just all bones! Where’d all the meat go?!”[2]
For someone like her, who didn’t game, she didn’t really have a concrete concept of how “skeleton” would work as a race in a game. She didn’t think it would literally be just a skeleton. However, this was a rare chance to try something new. She may not have realized it at the start, but now it was the race that she had chosen. It might have felt a little too foreign at first, but as far as “different from the usual her” went, nothing could be more different than this.
“All right! I’ll be a skeleton!”
After picking a race, next was configuring skills. That said, she had no idea what skills were good in games.
“I wonder what skills would be good for a skeleton… I’ve got no clue… Ah, it’d be cool to be able to use magic. Let’s learn some. Since I have no idea what’s good, I’ll just pick whatever sounds neat instead.”