Chapter 10:

Kasumi isn't a gamer

Former Magical Girls and their Daily Lives


Kasumi, Risa, and Yuri all stared at Megumi.

"I could tell really quickly, but I didn't want to call you out. No one would ever choose Winston Whurchill over Saint Watrick as their main if they want to get be a DPS. Do you know what a DPS is?"

"No."

"Well, it stands for Damage Per Second, I think. Someone will correct me at some point. Anyway, Damage Per Second is a measurement that shows how much damage you could do in a second, as the name implies. So, the characters who do a lot of damage are called DPS. As such, if you want to do a lot of damage, then you pick a DPS character. Saint Watrick is really powerful and I believe he's the most damaging character. It used to be Whandi, but that turned out to be a bug that the developers didn't want. Apparently, they set his damage so low, that it looped around and maxed out the damage he did. He was a killing machine. It was weird. When that happened, people destroyed levels like butter. He is still a cool character, but he isn't supposed to be such a powerful character."

"Okay," Kasumi said, "Why is Whurchill in a swimsuit?"

She pointed at the beach event of the game.

"That's the beach event. It's to sell all of the swimsuit skins of all of the characters. There's some story, but it has nothing to do with the main timeline. It's supposed to happen after the demons are finally defeated once and for all. The beach event is supposed to be a silly event."

"Can I actually play the game?"

"Sure."

They started playing the game. Megumi guided Kasumi through the confusing menu and sent her to the casual mode of the demon killers mode. She found the character select screen. There were about a hundred characters. Simply put, it was overwhelming, but Megumi told her to pick Saint Watrick because she believed that he was going to do the most damage.

Saint Watrick had a lot of abilities, but most importantly he had the snake ability. The snake ability will shoot out a snake and latch onto the demon that it hits. (It's supposed to be a reference to Saint Patrick banishing all of the snakes from Ireland.) The ability kills almost any demon almost instantly. But there are a lot of demons so it's hard to use, and as a complete noob, Kasumi couldn't kill anything.

"I don't think I won," she said as a dramatic 'FAILURE' popped on the screen as some invisible audience booed.

"You didn't. The demons won."

"This is sad."

"Well, you get to play to again. Everything restarts back to normal."

"Well, that isn't realistic. Things don't just restart in real life. You have to deal with your mistakes."

"Well, that makes the game too complicated. In order to make a more 'realistic' game, you'll have to code in everything that happens due to your mistakes. Like what happens if you die in the game?"

"If you die in the game, you die in real life. Easy."

"No one will willingly play that game!"

"Well, that's what soldiers do in real life."

"Soldiers get paid and many benefits for putting their lives on the line. Video game companies can't afford to pay their player enough to justify risking their lives. No one could make money like that."

"Okay, well, what if your character dies? Once Whurchill dies, no more of him."

"Well, there is a challenge in the game Wokemon that players try to complete where if one of your Wokemon faints, you have to get rid of it. It's like they only have one life. That is possible, but Wokemon has potentially infinite Wokemon to catch. So, you can play it relatively easily. If you apply that logic to Demon Killers III, then you'll run out of characters really quickly, and you can't play anymore. I think one of the issues I'm seeing with your logic is that games aren't supposed to be realistic. A lot of time it's supposed to be escapism."

"Escapism?"

"Yeah, people want to escape from the real world. Think about it. In the game, you are playing as a historical figure who also kills demons. In real life, you are some normal high school girl with normal high school girl problems. Sometimes, you need a little escape from these normal problems. So, you pretend you have the problems of a historical figure who also kills demons. Killing demons may be hard sometimes, but it's straightforward. All you have to do is win. All you have to do is to complete the mission. Real-life problems don't usually work that way. You can't just shoot a relationship issue until it dies. You can't pass a class by blowing it up. Video games give so many people an escape from reality. While video game problems aren't made to be easy, they are so much simpler than any real problems you might have... Why are you crying?"

Kasumi was sobbing her eyes out.

"You are right. Killing demons is so much simpler than dealing with drama. That simple objective is such a point of joy for so many people. It's a hard life for sure, but you could at least say that you had a goal. That you could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Crisis helps the human soul find meaning. Modern life made us too weak. We care too much for the details. We don't have to deal with hunting food and starvation. So, we make up our own little wars. We make up fake drama to keep ourselves entertained. People get screwed over for no good reason. We aren't wired for such a massive civilization. We don't know how it feels how to run for our lives anymore. We are just being chased by very slow jaguars, but our brains can't understand that. As far as it knows, we are still in caves. It's just that we never seem to leave the cave. We have to exercise."

"Kasumi, I know you are getting really emotional, but we are just talking about a game here, and I'm sorry, but I don't see where you are going with this."

"Oh, of course, it's just a game. How could I forget?" said Kasumi, suddenly shifting into a positive mood.

"Seriously, what do you think we are talking about?"

Shirul
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Parsatag
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-june-
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