Alpha Simulator

Stewart was a self confessed simulation video game aficionado. City builders, business management, even dating sims; he played any that he could get his hands on and the lower the cost, the better it was for him. Due to recent circumstances he wasn’t exactly working with much cash, especially considering his parents made him pay rent on the basement apartment he was living in under the family home. It really didn’t help that he’d recently been made redundant from his job as a barista, although while he was between jobs he had nothing but time to play the assorted games he’d loaded onto his Steam library and that was a win in his book!

It was a week into his suddenly gained free time that he discovered Alpha Simulator on his list of installed games, which was strange because he hadn’t remembered it being on the system previously. Must have hit install when I was half asleep, he rationalized, having had more than a few late nights fuelled by cans of cheap beer in the previous few days. He spared a moment to look over the synopsis on the game page and chuckled at the brief piece of information it gave: BE THE MAN YOU’VE ONLY EVER DREAMED OF BEING! GET BIG, GET RICH, GET LAID! There wasn’t even a list of features included to entice potential audiences; Stewart would be going in blind, but he figured it would be amusing for at least a few moments even if it was a poorly-made piece of junk like some of the other games he had recently downloaded.

As the game loaded up and introduced him to its menu screen though, the self-proclaimed gamer was surprised to find that it had a sleek and professional design. Give it time to disappoint, he warned himself away from being too optimistic, Don’t judge a video game by its menu screen! He’d fallen for that trap before. The character creation screen that followed after he’d guided his cursor to the ‘Campaign Mode’ option was another good sign though, as he was greeted by a high-resolution character model and a list of sliders and drop-down menus for him to customize the character’s appearance. Naturally, rather than making an avatar who would properly reflect his own unimpressive appearance, he chose to make his character into ‘the man he’d only ever dreamed of being’, just as the game’s synopsis had encouraged him to do.

After thirty minutes of carefully getting each slider into the right position to achieve the desired look for his character, Stewart relaxed back in his chair to admire his handiwork. The digital man on the screen was, as promised, everything that Stewart wasn’t: six-foot-two, two-hundred-and-ten pounds of lean muscle, short hair in a stylish cut and with designer stubble along his manly square jawline. In fact the gamer felt a strange pang of jealousy as he regarded his creation; why couldn’t that be him?

Once he had selected ‘Finished external creation!’ Stewart was then carried onto the next page where he was met by a thirty question survey. The questions were varied at best and really forced Stewart to think about how his ideal life would look: “What would your dream career be?”; “Do you want to get married and if so, at what age?”; “How would you want people to describe you to strangers?” Each progressive question felt like a greater obstacle and it was another hour before he’d finished answering all of the questions in detail. He wasn’t sure why he was putting so much thought into it, given he doubted that the game had advanced enough programming for his responses to actively shape the gameplay in any particular fashion, but he simply couldn’t stop himself from getting fully indulged once he’d started.

After almost ninety minutes of preparation Stewart was finally able to start the game, the sleek loading screen alerting him that his journey to becoming a video game production company CEO was about to begin… Already including stuff from that questionnaire? Neat! Once the game loaded up though, Stewart was caught off guard as the avatar he was laying didn’t look like the one he had spent so long creating. No, instead the avatar looked a lot like him: skinny, short and soft-featured. He was equal parts annoyed and creeped out until he noticed the small LED light illuminated next to his webcam. How had he not noticed that earlier? The game must have captured his image and created a lifelike avatar for him to play so he could work his way up into being the dream guy he’d designed. Still creepy and very frustrating, sure, but actually a pretty awesome gimmick to set the game apart, Stewart reasoned.

The gameplay itself walked on a point-and-click style that he was more than accustomed to given his years of playing video games and, even after the epic marathon of creating a character, he managed to spend another three hours playing through the first few months of his character’s career before he realized that it was somehow half two in the morning and he pretty desperately needed some sleep. He figured he’d made pretty good progress for his first few hours of gameplay, having started up his indie game development studio (of which he was currently the only employee) and getting signed up to a gym (clicking on the mirror in his character’s bathroom revealed a small bit of definition on his torso, which Stewart himself was proud of). He couldn’t fight off the need for sleep forever though but the game continued to occupy his mind even as he slipped into dreams of developing - what else - simulation games.

Almost as soon as he woke up just before midday, Stewart was back at his computer and loading Alpha Simulator back up. Once again he was sucked right into a marathon gaming session playing through his avatar’ first few years as a game developer. He hired a few new hands for his company after putting out a semi-successful shopping simulator for smartphones, gained some more notable definition from instructing his character to attend the gym five days a week and started to make enough money to buy some nicer clothes, get a stylish haircut and upgrade his miserable basement apartment for a small but comfortable city apartment. Looking around him, Stewart let out an amazed chuckle as he realised that the in-game apartment now mirrored the small apartment he had moved into just a few months ago when his career as a game developer had started taking off. Moving out of his parents’ basement had been the best thing ever, he felt like so much more of a man now!

Taking a short lunch break and leaving his apartment for a walk around the neighborhood just to stretch his legs, Stewart mulled over how his decision to start up his own company just over two years previously had shaped his life. He’d taken what felt like an impossible dream and started to make it a reality, although sometimes it still felt too good to be true. Still, he wasn’t quite at the level he wanted to be, which was why he kept playing simulation games as research to ensure that he was keeping up with whatever was popular with the gaming audiences at the time.

Once he was back at his expensive home workstation though, it was right back to Alpha Simulator and just a few short hours later a notification popped up on screen to alert Stu that he had just reached the end of his fifth year in the campaign mode, prompting another chuckle. In quite the coincidence it was the fifth year anniversary of him founding his company in real life and it brought him a fair bit of success, enough to move into a slightly larger apartment in the downtown area and treat himself to a personal trainer and dietician who had helped him craft a body to be proud of, working his way up to two-hundred pounds of pure muscle. His game development team was now a staff of ten and if the sales of their recent baseball management game continued to soar then it was likely they’d be moving into a larger office space soon too!

A few hours later when the game alerted him that the campaign would be complete at the end of the tenth year, Stu felt strangely disappointed. Even though he’d been playing for almost fourteen hours he still would have happily played fourteen more. The last in-game year barely took another half an hour and when the ‘CAMPAIGN COMPLETE!’ message appeared on the screen, the professional video game developer let out a long breath. Simply put, that had been one hell of an intense gaming experience, the likes of which he had never experienced before!

Pulling himself away from his computer, he checked his messages and was pleased to see a text from the Vice President of his company assuring him that everything was business as usual on both the development and market fronts. Stu had decided to take a rare week off work to kick back and enjoy some games for himself just like he used to do all the time as a teen. Now he was a thirty year old man who was on the cusp of being a millionaire and the lanky awkward boy he had once been felt like he was a whole world away! He’d been so awfully unsure of himself that he’d never even been on a date until he was already in his twenties! Thankfully packing on the muscle and changing up his look for something more refined meant that getting dates was no longer an issue: he was practically fighting off the guys who wanted a slice of the hunky video game developer and the most eligible CEO bachelor in the whole city!

Still dressed in only the boxers he had slept with, which sat tight around his perky ass, muscular quads and pronounced bulge, Stu fired a message off to his company’s VP: Just finished my playthrough of Alpha Simulator. Let’s lock in that release date for six months time and start putting our promo together. I’ve got a good feeling that this one’s gonna be our biggest seller yet! Stu couldn’t wait to unleash his company’s latest game on the world; he was already certain that it was going to be making a lot of people very happy, just as it had for him!