2 Chapter 1
Then he remembered, that egg was a game machine of online games, yesterday he finally receives it after waiting for a month for it. Allan was a game fan, but machines that allow you to play virtual games were expensive, too much for him. One of his friends took notice of that capsule on a web page for a very suspicious price, so instead of buying it, he told him about it (What a great friend).
After investigating a bit Allan found out that it was an old model for a discontinued game of a bankrupt company and decided to buy it. It was an obvious scam, in the old virtual reality video games, games of different companies need different capsules. Still, it was clear that the person who sold the capsule don't know about the last news of the market.
The game market is a very close market and is difficult for new competitors to appear because if people want to play their games, they would have to buy a personalized game capsule, which no matter how good it is the game, no one would buy it unless is a new revolutionary gaming method. So, to confront this barrier new companies started to design games that can be played in any type of game capsule.
Allan bought it to play this new generation of games, in particular a new game: Idle Online. If you asked anyone if they knew the game they would say: yes, but if you tell them if they would play it, they would scream: CRAZY!!!
Idle Online was a game known by everyone, there were three reasons for that: first, it was a new game. Everyone is searching for new and interesting games all the time, that was because, in a multiplayer game after a year, the power distribution between top guilds was set, they get the best fields, classes, and quests, and ordinary players only can do is:
Enter the game -> Slay normal monsters (no BOSS, even Elite sometimes is impossible) -> Level up -> Get out of the game
And that´s all, it isn't fun to play anymore, anyone who buys a game wants to be the protagonist of his own history, nobody would want to be Villager A and watch how the hero does the adventure.
And the same goes for crafting classes, the dreams to forge legendary equipment are reduced to working with common materials in a small shop if you get lucky, after a few years when the big guilds defeat the final BOSS they stay for a while, milk all that they could and they change to another game, by that time there isn't anything interesting to do, maybe there will be a few updates but that's all to it, there is no place for normal players to enjoy the game.
The second reason is that this game is said to have 95% of realism, and until now the biggest percentage was about eighty percent, to have such statistics if they are true that would be close to a second reality. One has to think that eighty percent was already a very big digit, that was because small defects come one after another, monster AI, NPC, buildings, scenery, bugs, and a lot of small errors until the game isn't realistic anymore. It would be a lie to say that nobody is curious about how it could be. Nobody thought that to be a lie. After all, to be able to sell a virtual game in the country you have to pass the inspection of the government, and any false statement said by the game company will be fined and retired from the market as fast as could be possible.
The third and most important reason why nobody wants to play this game is an announcement by the game company: All skills learned in the game can be used in the real world. That is a good thing, everyone thought so the first time a game said such a thing.
Twenty-five years ago, another company said the same about its newly launched game, and it was true. When a player got a skill, information about the skill was injected inside his/her brain, and the more one leveled up that skill more and more information about it was sent to the user, meaning that an expert tailor in the game became an expert tailor in the reality.
Everybody was delighted, the game was said to be a new step in human evolution, imagine getting the knowledge of a lifetime of hard work after playing a game for a few years, people of all standings played the game, no matter the age or status, everybody was optimistic about the future and the possibilities that it could bring along, and that game became the most sold game in the history of the planet … until six months later of the launching date.
An incident occurred in a high school, a sixteen years old teenager killed about one hundred people in his school with a sword, it was a massacre and became an internationally known incident.
There were needed twenty armed officers to arrest the boy, people question how could a teen like that do such a thing, but that was only the beginning, incidents like that pop out of nowhere one after another, and in the end, a magazine published the identity of the boy and all the other, they were the top players of the game.
When the public became conscient the damage that could be caused because of the game, that anybody who played the game could do something like this, the public opinion took a nosedive about the game, but nothing more, everybody continue to play, after all, there were mad people in every corner but the game company had no fault.
This was an interesting case in the countries where the game company was demanded by the victim's relatives, the final say was that the game company can't stop people from playing the game only based on the possibility that the user could do something bad with their skills, it would be like a library was at fault because one person read chemistry books and made a bomb with that knowledge, but the new cases didn't stop.
Finally, the governments of different countries searched about the nature of these terrible acts, after an exhaustive joint investigation it was discovered that these users had serious brain damage caused by a long-time exposure to the game that led them to make these acts.
The most horrible case was the first boy and the first clue, he was a user that got his swordsmanship to the highest level in the game, he was like an idiot, he couldn't do anything alone, but the moment he had a sword he changed and started to kill anyone in the surroundings. Other cases were discovered where the users had borderline personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic attacks, and other mental problems.
The problem was, as was suspected, the skills learned in the game, and the game capsule which was tinkered with to allow such function.
The game was killing people.
When this was discovered, it caused public outrage, forget about losing money, everybody wanted the culprit's head, an incident of such size couldn't be covered no matter the circumstances. The investors, the management, the lead investigators, and everyone who knew about the consequences of playing the game but ignored them was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity.
After the incident, a lot of people were said to have some mental scars from the use of the game. Luckily, the effect in most people was temporal and they could continue a normal life after therapy, only people with long-term exposure suffered from permanent effects.
Even now, the brain is a complete mystery that nobody has unraveled, and of course, nobody dares to do something similar.
Since then, new laws concerning user protection were born, all the game capsules must have the security check of the government, and of course, any modification to a game capsule that affected the brain, except the transfer of conscience to the game, is completely illegal.
The sector was very damaged by this incident and a lot of organizations started campaigns against the virtual online game market.
Were necessary a lot of efforts to make people forget about it. Even now, the effects of the incident can be seen in some places and everyone have fear that the same thing can happen again.
The reason Allan wants to play this game is very simple: he doesn't think that the same will happen.
It may be seen as rash but Allan has his reason for that. In first place, he knows that for the company that made these claims in the open, the government must have not found anything that could have everlasting damage to the user, allowing such a thing when the company has made this announcement would be a political suicide.
Of course, Allan doesn't believe in the government's competence, the reason why Allan considers the game safe is that he researched himself the game and the way to gain skills is completely different from most people's thought.
Moreover, Allan believes that Idle Online could be this century's game, a true masterpiece that can have positive consequences in the real world, so for this reason Allan wants to experience the game to see how it is, to have a head start, and of course, to have fun.
So, he got to the capsule and started installing, this procedure isn't hard and a lot of people know how to do it, after all, game capsules serve for more than just play. One of the most sought features of these capsules is the time dilatation, after a very important debate it was decided that the maximum legal time difference was 1:4, and even that let society change the management of their time; the average academic results increased especially to the point that these capsules are used in tutoring and prestigious schools, children and adult had more time to study, learn new thing and enjoy free time, and while the use of capsules during sleep time it was frowned upon by experts, there was no evidence of lasting damage to the user.
After finishing installing the capsule, Allan went to his laptop and entered the official game website, as he expected the game wasn't having a lot of users and most of the new players were weirdos, madmen, or desperate streamers hoping to earn a penny for publishing videos of the game
