QUILL

Love, the iconic sculpture originally designed by Robert Indiana, was made of four giant, red block letters stacked on top of each other: the L and O on top, the V and E on the bottom, the O tilted on an angle. Was that crookedness just to give the design some personality, or was it a comment on the nature of love? Who knew? The sculpture was a selfie hotspot located in a commercial district of Tokyo, the world’s biggest city with over thirty-seven million people, the art not far from the world’s busiest train station: Shinjuku. 

The night sky was a magical dark purple, but though the night sparkled, it was not from the heavens, but from the millions of lights that make Tokyo seem like a city of stars at night, from the many skyscrapers with offices and apartments still alight at this late hour, to the streetlights and signal lights and passing trains and even garlands of white, Christmas-style lights on the trees behind the LOVE sculpture, despite it being summer. 

Many couples and groups of friends, enjoying this Friday night, stood in front of the sculpture or even climbed up onto it for their pictures. There were plenty of smiling faces, more than a few flushed red after an evening of dinner and drinking parties. Thousands more people walked up and down the streets. In Tokyo, you were rarely alone. At least physically. 

Emotionally, it was another matter entirely.

Quill Bennet stood on the sidewalk, enjoying watching the locals having fun around the sculpture. He was only here in Tokyo on business for a couple of days, visiting government offices. His home city, for the moment, was Osaka, Japan’s second biggest city with a ‘mere’ twenty million people, only an hour and a half away via high-speed rail in the Kansai region. In Osaka, he served as a liaison for foreign workers in the area, from bankers to businessmen, import-exporters to teachers. He was a government bureaucrat, and his job was very dull. 

It was also very lonely. 

Being a foreigner in Japan was incredibly fun in many ways. Just being here, his brain felt stimulated in a way that it never was back in his home country. Everything was just slightly different, and it was a real pleasure to walk these streets, even after a very long day of boring meetings where nothing important ever happened, and hours of formal dining and drinking with other overworked bureaucrats and salary-people. 

He very much enjoyed the company of many Japanese people, but no matter how long he lived in this country, no matter how hard he worked to speak the language, no matter how well he got along with people at work, he was always gaijin (foreigner), and always on the outside. People were friendly and polite — much more so than back home. But developing real, intimate relationships here was nearly impossible for many foreigners, except with a romantic partner, but he’d not yet met the right person as far as marriage might be concerned. 

His first girlfriend here, Rina, was a workaholic career woman. She’d been consantly frustrated by his desire to spend more time together, time she’d felt took away from time she could be spending on client and coworker dinners and drinks or other things that would help her rise in the company that she worked for. She was a corporate ladder climber, all the way. It had eventually become clear to both of them that what she really wanted was someone with a good income in the background of her life, someone that made her look good to her peers and gave her extra money to live comfortably with, while he’d wanted a real partner and someone to do things with. She was live-to-work; he was work-to-live. It had been heartbreaking to end things with her because he’d loved literally everything else about her but her choice of career over their relationship.

Quill’s second girlfriend had seemed fun, friendly and caring — to begin with. It had soon become clear that all she wanted was to make as many babies as possible, as soon as possible, with whatever foreign guy paid her the most attention. And that she was incredibly insecure. He hadn’t been ready for a family quite yet and had struggled to accommodate her jealousy and clingy need for constant attention. She’d even gone so far as sleeping with other foreign guys in some misguided desire to make him jealous as if that would make him fight for her and want her more. He’d walked away. She’d married someone else six months later and gotten pregnant immediately afterwards. Quill felt that he’d dodged a bullet with her.

Outside of romance, Quill did work on building friendships. Even if it was difficult to build deep friendships with Japanese people, there were other foreigners in Japan, of course, and that helped. There weren’t many, as the country was still extremely homogenous, with foreigners and mixed-ancestry Japanese together accounting for three percent or less of the population. Unfortunately, most foreigners who came didn’t stay; they returned home after a year or two. So while it was interesting meeting so many new and varied people all the time, it was difficult to form deeper, lasting friendships and a reliable social-support network. He was also of an age when many of his friends were starting families and choosing to stay home rather than meet up. And he hadn’t found the right woman to start that kind of life with yet. Though he wanted to.

So, after four years in Japan, watching so many good friends move on and having such a challenging time forming deep friendships with locals, Quill was feeling isolated. It was having an effect on him, dampening his enjoyment in life. He found it increasingly difficult to get up in the morning with any sort of real motivation. And he’d taken to giving up on activities and people more and more and just sitting around at home, streaming too much TV. 

Looking around at the ever-present Shinjuku crowd, folks always around no matter the hour of the day or night, he made a sad smile. He couldn’t decide if being around so many people made the loneliness easier or worse. 

Briefcase in hand, he leisurely strolled down the street in the general direction of his hotel, in no rush, happy to walk off some of the too-many calories he’d consumed that evening. Luckily, living in Japan meant a lot of daily walking and bicycle riding, which helped to stave off becoming overweight. Although, while he might say that now at thirty-two years of age, it might be a different story once he hit forty. It was hard to lay off the all-you-can-eat-and-drink here in Japan, though. The food was so damned good. 

The ramen, the barbeque, the sukiyaki, the sushi, the nabe… Visions of umeboshi plums danced in his head. 

Many stores were still open, as it wasn’t quite time for last train yet. He strode by large, brilliantly glowing windows of convenience stores and fast food restaurants. He passed a darkish alley with a drunk salaryman pissing on a trashcan in full view of everyone passing by; it was odd how often you saw that in an otherwise very well-behaved country. He felt a burst of disgust. Japanese women and girls were as ladylike and as classy as anyone could be, and he greatly admired and respected them. But their male counterparts, on the other hand, all too often showed a cruder side. He felt guilty making such wide generalizations, but he’d seen too many scenes like this, and absolutely none had ever involved a woman. 

Coming across an electronics store, he saw that the window was plastered with huge game ads featuring fantasy warriors and mages and monsters. One particular brand dominated them all:

New Release!

World of Fantasy:

Golden Impact

A pang of nostalgia coursed through Quill, and he came to a halt, causing a ripple in those suddenly forced to go around him. He smiled. 

 World of Fantasy (WoF) was the original MMO, the first to really grow massive, and it had dominated the market for much of the past twenty-some years. In terms of tech and gaming, that was basically like saying they’d held their own from the stone age to the modern era: it was very impressive. 

Quill had first played World of Fantasy in its earliest days. Back then, the game had been a wonder. The vast, open world had really felt like an adventure. Exploring it hadn’t been something people would do just to grind up levels and move on from; the exploring and questing itself had been the point of the game. And he’d loved it.

He remembered with much fondness how he’d started out as a solo player but had gradually made friends in the game, teaming up to complete overworld quests, hang out, and do the occasional dungeon. For almost two years, he’d spent his days anticipating nights with those friends in that amazing world. Adventuring together, sharing goals, and growing together had created deep ties between players despite being in entirely different countries and cultures.

Career changes and a girlfriend had put more demands on his time and had led him to eventually quit the game for a long time. He’d come back, about eight or ten years later for another go, hit hard by nostalgia that time as well. But he hadn’t lasted long in the game. The open world had been dumbed down to super easy mode, and nobody teamed up for it anymore. Players would just grind it as fast as possible until they were high enough level to get to the next dungeon and then run dungeons over and over for the best gear. 

A dungeon-finder system had been introduced, allowing people to instantly find others to party with, removing any need to talk to others or to build relationships. And people didn’t explore dungeons anymore or take their time to do every mini boss or explore every room. People just signed up with the dungeon finder to get on a team and then speed-ran the best bosses for the best loot and quit, only to repeat the process endlessly. They didn’t even talk to each other during runs. The social aspects had vanished.

Quill had been incredibly disappointed in the lack of adventure, the advent of grinding, and the brutal loss of community. When he did talk to people in the game, it felt like they were now all hard-core gamers and had zero tolerance for anyone new. And toxicity, a rarity in the past, was everywhere as people had come to focus on competition rather than comradery. He’d quit the game after only a couple of weeks, too heartbroken by the changes to stick around any longer. That had soured him on gaming, and he’d never really regained any interest, devoting himself to other pursuits instead, like sports and romance.

He wasn’t the only player to leave that world behind. Over the years, the game developer was hit by scandals: sexual harassment suits, poor working conditions, and union busting. NOVision, the corporate publisher and developer, had merged with Wizard, the design company behind the actual game. Micro-transactions and monetization had exploded. It had been easy enough to find reasons to stay away. 

That was then. But now…

Standing outside that store window with his briefcase in hand, bathed in florescent light as a crowd flowed around him, it wasn’t the heartbreak he recalled now, but the golden days of yore. That was likely exactly what NOVizionWizard was promoting with this new game. 

World of Fantasy, Golden Impact was the game developer’s first foray into the recent explosion of full-dive MMOs. Unlike their previous games, which were played on a computer, full-dive games were one hundred percent immersive. You plugged your brain directly into the game machine and entered a whole new world that felt just as real to you as the everyday world did, interacting with all your senses. Needless to say, once the tech had progressed to the point where full dives now felt realistic instead of pixel-like, the genre had taken over. 

Other games had been very successful in releasing full-dive versions, but NOVisionWizard had, by far, the biggest historical brand name and a legion of former fans who probably missed the game as much as Quill now found himself missing it. The company also had vast coffers to invest. He’d read about how they’d vowed to pull out all the stops to become the best again. Golden Impact had been years in the making.

Banking on player nostalgia and a name that had once been grand, investing everything into creating a game that catered to players even more than it had in the old days, they’d apparently created an experience that had caused beta players to rave with excitement. It had lit a firestorm of passion on the internet. Like millions of others, he’d followed development progress closely, increasingly drawn to the idea of actually being inside the story world that had once so fascinated him.

Quill glanced towards the front doors of the store. Did he want to investigate the new release? Could he really see himself getting back into gaming? Or was he too old now, at thirty-two? Or was that just silly? Games weren’t just for kids anymore, right? And it’s not like he had a family to spend his time on…

He recalled the excitement he’d felt the first time he’d stopped text chatting and talked to people using their real voices in the original game. He remembered the laughter and silliness as he and his friends had crawled dungeons together. His heart warmed at the memory of hours spent just hanging out in public plazas, teasing and telling dumb jokes. And the times he and a friend had pulled each other aside, just the two of them, sharing feelings and talking about real life together, providing support when needed. Because of the people he’d been connected to, the game world had felt like home. 

And suddenly, he craved that.

Impulsively slipping back into the flow of pedestrians, he made his way to the automatic doors, which slid aside as he and others approached. Leaving the summer evening behind, he entered, and cool air washed over him. 

Inside the bright main lobby of the electronics retailer, World of Fantasy had set up shop with a huge display showing wicked-cool, movie-style previews. Guys and girls in top-of-the-line cosplay posed behind a row of cute girls with toothy grins and micro-mini skirts. The latter handed out flyers and packs of tissue with ads inserted in them. Well-dressed store staff in uniform stood by with polite smiles, ready to help interested people sign up for the game.

Seeing the big World of Fantasy logo overhead felt like a punch in the heart. It was difficult to recall all the negatives that had driven the previous MMO to eventual ruin, yet so easy to recall the incredible game it had been. And he still fondly recalled the game world itself and all of its characters. The feeling sliced right through his loneliness, making him even more aware of the latter, and more eager than ever to banish it. He wanted people he could hang out with again. He wanted to feel excited about a game again. He wanted to be in an adventuring party with people who cared about him, rather than ‘the foreign guy’ drifting in a sea of locals who never fully accepted him. 

He let himself approach one of the staff. 

She beamed up at him. “Welcome! Are you interested in signing up for World of Fantasy, Golden Impact? Only one million slots will be open for new players at this time. And they’re filling up very fast.”

“Oh?” Quill accepted a flyer from the woman. 

“Registration started an hour ago—”

“An hour ago?” he interrupted. “But it’s so late.”

“We’re thirteen hours ahead of New York,” she explained. “Globally, we’re already at more than nine hundred thousand new players.”

“Nine hundred!” Quill marvelled. Apparently, whatever difficulties the company had faced before, the public was eager to put the past behind them and to trust them once more. 

She gestured to the tablet in her hand, and half turned to stand closer to him, showing him the registration screen. “Shall we sign you up for a new unit before space runs out?”

Quill hesitated, a sliver of doubt appearing for the first time as practical considerations finally hit him. Full-dive machines were stand-alone devices, the games far too massive to fit on a standard computer. Plus, headgear and an integration system were involved. He looked at a 3D cutout of the machine standing in front of them. The price tag on it made him cringe. This was really a lot more than he should spend on a video game. It’s not like he was a hard-core gamer, right? Think of all the things that money could be spent on. And if he found a new girlfriend, would she approve of something like this or see it as immature and wasteful?

Indecision twisted his gut.

A bell dinged. 

The saleswoman checked the tablet in her hands. “Ah. Nine hundred and fifty thousand players now. Better hurry, or you’ll miss out.”

Quill folded. The lure of the game, the nostalgia and desire for friendship, the anticipation of the crowd, the glorious cosplayers, and the cute girls all overcame whatever weak defences he had in place to protect his slender bank account. He nodded.

She grinned and punched something into her tablet, then began taking his information. 

Quill mentally tried to hold back a powerful, childish sense of anticipation for the game and fear over the money he was spending. But the game wouldn’t launch for another three weeks while full-dive systems were delivered. He’d just stay home every night and subsist on cup ramen to save money. A silly grin crept over his lips, and he felt like an idiot in front of the saleswoman, but, after all, he really was excited.