"So this is real…" Gabe sighed as he looked in a nearby mirror after waking up.
The expression on his face was completely different from an average expression after waking up, because this was the second time he had woken up here!
To explain it better, yesterday Gabe had also woken up confused in this strange place. He had never seen this place - the technology around him was more up to date than the technology he knew - but considering he had just gone to sleep, Gabe considered it as some kind of lucid dream without much worry.
Thinking that in a few hours he would wake up, Gabe took the time to explore the place where he had found himself. It didn't take him long; in just three minutes he had completely understood the layout of the place, as he was currently in a small apartment. In the apartment there was only a single television, showing a science fiction movie. The television had a very good resolution by the way, something that made the 8k televisions he knew of look like old scrap metal.
'This is like something only a dream can represent…' he thought as he looked around after losing interest in the television.
The kitchen was very familiar, but at the same time, it had a strangeness to it. It was as if he knew this place. He implicitly understood what each appliance was, but he had no idea how to use almost any of them, which just reminded him of a fact he had once read:
"The human brain is not capable of creating unimaginable faces or scenes. So for me to be dreaming this, at some point I must have seen something very similar, where my brain must have just changed some detail to make it look like something new," he said to himself as he looked at these things for a few seconds.
The rest of the house didn't have much of any interest. The only other thing that attracted his attention was that in his room there was a table with a computer, but just as he imagined a science fiction computer to be, with a holographic screen and lots of white light, this was exactly what he was seeing.
"How about experiencing the scope of this dream?" Gabe wondered, before sitting down and starting to use the computer.
The operating system felt a lot like Windows, so it was pretty natural for him to navigate things. To Gabe's surprise, even though there was a lot that resembled real life, the internet in this dream had a lot of interesting stuff and quite a few things he hadn't even thought of before.
As a Hardcore gamer, Gabe liked to try out all kinds of games, especially games nominated for the Game Awards. It had become a tradition for him to finish the nominated games and platinum the winning games, after which he would do a detailed review for each game and would publish his opinion on the internet if that game deserved the prize it had received or not.
As he did it with passion, Gabe's name had spread widely on the internet, to the point where he became one of the most highly regarded game critics among the hardcore audience. But he was disappointed with his dream. Even though there were a huge amount of games coming out, from the trailers he was seeing, the quality of these games was terrible.
Scrolling through gaming websites and news, he saw that there was currently a university game develop contest going on, but to his disappointment, the game with the most clicks was a game called "Spear Throwing Training".
The name was something Gabe had never seen before, but watching the gameplay trailer for the game, he felt it was terrible. Basically, the player had to stand in a canoe on the high seas while fish jumped around them out of the water and the player had to throw their spear at the fish. The more fish the player hit, the stronger their ability to throw the spear will become.
Since when was this something that qualified as a game?!
Not even clickers were that bad, as in clickers the players could easily get addicted to due to the evolutionary need for dopamine. If this was a clicker, the player could evolve the spear, their canoe, gain more glowing effects, be able to throw more spears, have weapons that launched automatic spears… But from what Gabe saw, none of that happened. The player just had to stay there, hurling spears aimlessly, forever.
"This appears to be a VR game, but still, how could anyone want to play this?" Gabe tried to find plausible reasons by analyzing the game footage but nothing was apparent.
Exasperated, Gabe had looked at the comments and was furious at the amount of praise this game was getting.
[I have to thank the creator of this game! As a former F Rank spear user, this game was mainly responsible for helping me rise to E Rank!]
[Although I am already a Rank E spear-using warrior, this game has helped me a lot. In the last battle I participated in, my companion was about to be killed by a goblin attacking from behind, but luckily I used the skill I learned in this game and managed to hurl the spear successfully at the goblin and save my companion!]
[Surprisingly, this game was made by a university student. The foresight of using the sea waves to help with balance training while the player has to aim for fish with irregular movements was a very smart idea. This game absolutely deserves the #1 slot!]
[The most striking feature in this game is the design of the fish, to think that a college student made something like that amazes me, there are over 20 different fish, some even with scales as thick as Rank E monsters! The creator of this game must be a genius!]
[…]
Of the almost 50 comments Gabe read through, there was only one negative comment, which complained that the user couldn't stand up in the canoe and blamed the game creator for this, something totally illogical. However, the vast majority of the comments only praised the game creator for being a genius to think of a training method like that, or how he made all of the fish very different and some even with quite resistant scales.
Going back to look at the game footage, Gabe couldn't even differentiate the fish much from one another. It seemed that the biggest difference was the texture: Some were formed a little bigger than the rest, but it wasn't like the difference was glaringly obvious.
Thinking of the game Man Eater that he had played a few months ago, with so many different varieties of sharks for the player to evolve into, seeing this game was like the difference between earth and sky.
"Why are these people praising this so much?" Gabe was confused and started looking up information on this contest, thinking maybe that was the theme to it?
When he finally got a good description, Gabe finally understood why this was happening and couldn't help but be amazed at the creativity of his brain to think of something this profound.
Apparently gamers in this Dreamland of his could play games and get skills in real life, and while there was a minority of people who were gifted with the profession of Game Developer, the other 95% of people were made up of gamers who experienced games made by Developers and got skills from them.
The Game Developer profession was something very honored among people, since it was only because of the games developed by those who had this profession that humanity had survived, with so many invasions of monsters from other worlds trying to dominate the Earth.
Game Developers could be divided from Rank F to Rank S. While all Developers started at Rank F and trained to reach Rank S someday, only a small percentage ever managed to reach Rank A and less than only 10 people around the world had ever reached Rank S.
In the same way, Gamers were also divided from Rank F to Rank S, but because they had a larger population, the amount of Rank S Gamers was composed of a few hundred people worldwide. Just with that one could see the difference in rarity between a Game Developer and a Gamer - where while a Rank S Gamer was very powerful, a game made by a Rank S Game Developer was enough to train thousands of Rank B Gamers to Rank A and even some to Rank S.
Understanding that people were experimenting with this game for training purposes, Gabe finally understood why this Spear Throwing Training game was so popular, as it was a very practical way to train in spear throwing. Although Gabe still saw numerous flaws in it and knew of several ways to make this game more attractive and interesting, compared to the other games that were being evaluated for training, this one was really better.
"If I were to make a game to train this skill, I would probably do something like a clicker, where the player starts with a wooden spear and for each fish he kills he earns coins. These coins would then be exchanged for better spears with more effects that are more powerful, thus letting the player kill fish that are also more powerful that yield more coins for the player to buy an even better spear, and thus generating an infinite loop… something like Cookie Clicker, which was so simple and so addictive - to make something like that in this world with a different theme would probably be a hit. Too bad this is just a dream…" Gabe said as he scrolled through the games page.
Despite seeing the utility in most of these games, Gabe couldn't quite feel that these were really games.
'Wouldn't it be possible to write a story for the player to go on an adventure? That way the training would be less monotonous,' he thought.
Tired of seeing examples of these games, Gabe started looking at the other tabs on this site, and to his surprise, he already had a profile logged in.
[Gabriel Howard, age 22.]
"It's my name and my age," he said with a slightly raised eyebrow, thinking that it was only natural for it to be like that. Since it was just a dream of his mind, it wouldn't make sense for the brain to come up with another name.
Looking through the information, he discovered that he was a senior student of Game Development, and was currently on deadline to develop a game for his University's Final Paper, where he was supposed to show that he was capable of making a truly useful game for mankind, thus being able to become a true Game Developer.
The games he could play were divided into categories such as "Short Range Weapon Training Games", "Long Range Weapon Training Games" or even "Body Training Games"(which made him remember the spear throwing training game), among other categories, but he couldn't select any of them since apparently he already had a category selected.
"Firearms training games."
Paying attention to this category, Gabe read the description of how this game should be developed.
[The Game Developer's job in this game is to create a world where the Gamer can train in the use of firearms. As the usefulness of this type of weaponry against more powerful monsters is very low, it is recommended that the Game Developer keep this in mind when developing the game. The usefulness of skill training will also be evaluated.
Don't forget that repetitive movements alone are not the only way to improve a skill.]
Reading this description, several games that fit into this category came to Gabe's mind. Mainly thinking about weaker monsters, he imagined that this game would probably be popular for training something like a police force, which only needed to deal with other humans or only weak monsters that entered the city.
Games like Doom were discarded immediately from consideration, as the monsters in that game would probably fall into the category of very powerful monsters, so it would be better to focus on something weaker.
"I guess zombies fall into the category of weak monsters, don't they?" Gabe wondered aloud as a few Zombie games came to his mind. Among them, only one prevailed, that being one of the games nominated for Game of the Year at the 2021 Game Awards.
Gabe had to admit, even though the game wasn't perfect, Residual Devil Village was a very good game that veered away from the more boring theme that the other games in the Residual Devil franchise were following. In this game, the player had to deal with weak monsters like Zombies, and thinking about the last line of the description where it said that there was another way to train the skill, this game fit that even better.
Gabe found that the stronger the player's emotion, the more likely their body would be able to absorb skills from a game made by a Game Developer. And remembering how many scares he got and how scared he felt while playing Residual Devil Village, Gabe knew that the intensity of the emotion the player would have if playing a similar game would be very high, which would probably earn him extra points.
There were other games that the player could be very scared of, like Outlast, but thinking that in that game the player spent most of their time with a camera in their hand instead of a gun, Gabe felt that RE: Village fit that much better.
"Is it easy for me to make a game in this dream?" Gabe wondered interestedly.
He had already tried to make a game in his previous world, but the process for making games was too complicated, and in order to make a game as good as he imagined in the real world, not only would he need experience with coding and development processes, he would need another group of people to help him all of the objects and effects he imagined.
But when reading the game credits in this dream, there was only ever one person's name credited to every game: the Game Developer who made it. This was something that made Gabe consider that maybe in this dream it might be easier to make a game?
Curious, and trying to discover even more about the limits of this dream, Gabe started researching how a Game Developer's game was made and found out from the email history of his account that apparently he had received something called a "World Seed". The description of this Seed was that it was something like a small PenDrive that the Game Developer should inject their Mana into. After the Seed received the necessary amount to start, the Seed would dematerialize, using the Game Developer's Mana to synchronize with their consciousness and allow the Game Developer to use their consciousness to shape a little world within, the little world that would then become the game.
What Gabe found most interesting was that after the synchronization between the Game Developer and the Seed reached 100%, the Game Developer could control the Seed to appear or hide inside their body, and could use this to upload the game to the internet and could keep it in their body for modifications or game updates.
"What an interesting method," Gabe commented excitedly as he finished reading.
Thinking he had nothing more interesting to do in this dream, Gabe started looking for his Seed, and after 5 minutes he found it under his pillow.
Excited, Gabe started using the method he saw on the internet to control the Mana that only Game Developers had to synchronize with the Seed, but as soon as he managed to control the Mana in his body, Gabe started to feel his head hurting. A large amount of information was coming at him from somewhere: memories he never had, people he never saw, abilities he didn't know he had, various things he didn't know of were appearing in his mind. It was not like he was receiving these memories out of nowhere, but as if he was remembering! The amount of information he received was very large, to the point that Gabe, who was at the side of the bed after picking up the Seed, just had time to lean forward and fall onto the bed before his consciousness disappeared.
After several hours of sleep, Gabe woke up extremely tired. It was like he had been awake for 30 hours and had only slept for 2 hours, which was far from enough to let him rest, but enough for his body to feel groggy. But despite his body protesting, Gabe was worried about what happened and got out of bed.
His expression was terrible, especially when he saw which room he was in.
"So this is real…" Gabe sighed as he looked in the mirror after waking up.
This world that he thought was just a dream, apparently it wasn't just a dream like he had imagined.