“I mean, you didn’t really need to leave your school in Tokyo to come out to the country in the first place, did you?”
“...Why are you asking that now?”
“It might be the start of a new year, but it’s your second year... Everyone else has already spent a year together, and they probably at least know the faces of the other people in their year. Plus, they have connections through their clubs. Is it really possible for a new student to fit in like that...?”
“Can you quit building up my fears like a nervous monologue?” Kai asked bitterly.
“Haha! Make sure to screw up as spectacularly as you can,” Misako advised him. “If you half ass it, it’d be too normal to even laugh at.” Then, the lips that were so happily teasing Kai stopped, and Misako gave him a puzzled look. “You’re not gonna do that thing?”
“What thing?”
“The ritual where you line up a bunch of smartphones in front of a laptop,” she reminded him. “You used to do it all the time, remember?”
“Ritual...? It’s not that big of a deal,” he told her, although even now, he had four smartphones. Of these, he used one as his main phone for calls and text messaging. The other three were used only for smartphone game applications—that is to say, he had them to play social games with.
Playing a lot of social games made his mornings very busy. There were daily login bonuses (presents that you can get just for opening the game every day) that he needed to collect, play points (points needed to play the game, usually called stamina or something like that) he needed to use up so as not to waste any, and events he needed to run. Every morning, he’d do all of this with four phones in order to maximize his efficiency. The laptop was to log his data in.
Kai supposed that lining four phones up on a desk and robotically tapping at the screens all while logging a bunch of data into an Excel spreadsheet could seem like some sort of religious ritual, from someone else’s point of view.
“...I don’t feel like it today,” he admitted, knowing that it was all because of that dream.
He’d already been feeling down because it was his first day as a transfer student, but that sort of nightmare was a death blow first thing in the morning.
“I see,” Misako observed neutrally. “‘Today,’ huh?”
“Is that really worth noting?” Kai asked.
“Yup, it’s important. It might just be some weird ceremony to me, but to you, it’s a precious piece of your everyday life.”
“...Don’t just decide that on your own,” he told her.
“Are you gonna join the social game club here, too?” she asked next.
“...No.” He’d transferred from Tokyo just so that wouldn’t happen. Kai never intended to step into the developer’s side of social games ever again.
“I see,” said Misako, nodding with a gentle expression.
Kai couldn’t think of anything to say in the face of her sudden change in demeanor, and he turned on the TV once he could no longer bear the silence. What he’d thought was going to be the morning news was, for better or for worse, a ranking list of the top smartphone games as of this morning. First place was StrikeMon, second was D&P, third was...
Social games had completely permeated normal society. At the very least, they had enough influence to have a morning TV show with a time slot dedicated to their sales rankings.
Most of the younger generation played them, and ever since social games had been directly tied to children’s schooling, their parents had begun to care, as well.
The reason social games had grown to this point was because of what the government called the “IT Facilitation Act,” a piece of legislation that had established an Information Technology Facilitation Program and led a push toward students developing social games as a club activity.
“I have no clue what I’m looking at,” Misako remarked. “But the game you were working on was on this ranked list before, right?”
“...A few times,” Kai admitted modestly.
“That’s incredible,” she said. “I mean, there are game companies that even I’ve heard of on this show.”
There had been a lot of progress made in the realm of game development, and now there were student-made social games that were close to the same level as corporate titles. In particular, the high-performance game creation engine, Alchemia, raised the bar on student-made games as soon as it appeared on the scene. Its creator was unknown. The only thing anyone knew about the developer was that he called himself “Gacchaman.” The circumstances were as suspicious as they come, but even a corporate-led security analysis confirmed it wasn’t some sort of malicious virus, and the engine itself was so phenomenal that a large number of social games currently used it as their development engine.
From the corporations’ perspective, the increased number of students with immediate working knowledge of the field led to these top-tier IT companies sending out unofficial job offers to those who put out good results. And up until a few months ago, Kai had been at one of the most distinguished high schools for social games in the country. Now that he’d transferred, though, that was in the past.
Hey, wait a second. Kai rewound his brain a few steps. There was something peculiar about the news show he just watched. That’s it! D&P was second?! Nonononono, it was number one for three months straight! I can’t imagine D&P’s team dropped the ball anywhere, so StrikeMon must have done something. What kind of plan did they put into action? I need to check—
“‘...I’m not going to join the social game club,’ was it?” Misako asked.
“I-I was just curious because I happened to see it on the TV and—” Kai stopped his hand from unconsciously reaching for the phone in his pocket, and Misako giggled the way a child laughs at a prank.
Kai’s new school wasn’t in a big city to begin with, so it was doubtful they even had a social game club. IT companies generally based themselves in urban areas, and social game clubs were mostly prevalent in Tokyo. A smaller city like Niigata would probably have people who played social games, but on the creator’s end of it, any social game club here would pale in comparison.
Misako had said that he didn’t need to come out to the country, but that rural environment is exactly what Kai had been aiming for: he wouldn’t have anything to do with a social game club. That’s the entire reason he’d run away from Tokyo in the first place.
“...I won’t join it,” he declared adamantly.
Misako was clearly getting tired of him, but she still gave him a dampened smile. “It’s not that easy to throw away your everyday life,” she told him.