When you boiled down my profile, it was comprised of about one or two lines: Aoi Kousaka, Age 22; fresh out of some minor science university, and hardcore gamer.
Pretty straightforward, don’t you think? So straightforward it hurts, though. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say I had spent more than half my life so far playing games. Ever since I touched my first game at the age of three, I’d become completely obsessed, and dedicated my life to playing them. Although games were my lifeblood, I still worked hard to maximize the amount of time I had to play.
When I was a kid, I would set a time limit for playing games on the television because it wasn’t good for eye development. Instead, I would either play card or board games. Both my parents liked games and were very understanding, but I knew they wouldn’t be so understanding if my test scores dropped as a result. And so I did my best to keep all my grades above average in every subject.
When I got to middle school, there weren’t too many jobs available to someone my age, but I managed to find part-time work as a newspaper delivery boy, and saved money to buy the computer I’d so badly wanted—and games too, of course. When I finally bought the computer, I discovered that foreign PC games were cheap, so then I put all my efforts into learning English. In about a year’s time, I was able to understand all the English games I wasn’t able to get in Japanese. I had seriously lived to game my whole life thus far, but I came face-to-face with the harsh realities of life not too long ago.
Job hunting had started pretty early in the summer for third years at my university. There weren’t that many jobs that would let me secure not only a decent salary, but also enough time to still dedicate to playing games. The whole “large companies and corporations were life-sucking leeches” wasn’t a joke. What good was earning loads of money if I couldn’t play games? Nevertheless, I managed to get a job offer from a nearby facility as Location Management and Security. The pay wasn’t great, but at least I had a lot of free time for my hobbies. I lamented not being able to play a certain MMORPG that came out around the time due to taking certain qualification courses that would benefit said job, too.
Unfortunately, at the end of March, I received news that there was an accidental fire that had occurred at one of the facilities managed by the head company I was working for. As a result, the management staff was held liable, and subsequently downscaled. I was told that after my training period was up I was going to be let go as well since I was just a temporary contractor.
And so, I kept job hunting from the end of March, all the way until our graduation ceremony. Unable to find anything that met my criteria, I became a jobless university graduate.
Life’s “hardcore mode” was so hard that I couldn’t even muster a laugh.
I resumed job hunting the next spring, but still struggled with a lack of offers for two whole months post graduation. By then, the rainy season had begun.
One day I came across a random leaflet that had gotten caught in one of the newspapers I usually got at home. It was really small—smaller than the normal advertisements for the supermarket itself, but there looked to be a job offer on that leaflet that said:
Work Details:
- Facility Management position
- Salary: Starting from ¥140,000/mo
- Prior experience not required
- Traveling expenses covered
- Note: People with high stamina and proficiency with games will have priority
The details checked all the boxes I was looking for. The salary was a bit low compared to ones typically offered to graduate students, but it was definitely not low enough that I couldn’t live off it. I understood why they would want to hire healthy people, but people with an affinity for games? What did that have to do with managing facilities? Either way, I couldn’t have hoped for a better job than one I could use my love of games for, so I immediately got in touch and was offered an interview.