Guerrilla Stream
I sat down in front of the computer.
Only two days had passed since the collab, and today was supposed to be a day off. I sat down anyway, ready to go live. The reason was simple.
"I'm bored."
Until now, I'd been stretching my eight off-days as far as they would go — four streams a week, two days off, that kind of rhythm. I hadn't even been streaming that long, if I was being honest. But for the first time, I was breaking my own rule and sitting down at the PC for a fifth stream of the week.
A guerrilla stream, as they call it.
Click.
I went live without a second's hesitation. It was a guerrilla stream. No announcement needed, right?
There hadn't been a stream announcement at all, but people poured in almost immediately and started filling the chat.
"Yeah. Hello."
The usual, then.
"I just got bored, that's all."
"Wow. You people really never fail to exceed my expectations."
I huffed a dry laugh at the chat, where the Clean Bot was putting in another honest day's work.
"More importantly, what have you all been up to?"
"I didn't have anything to do, so I just rolled around in bed."
Yeah. Expecting a normal answer was on me.
"What do you usually do on your days off, though? I want some recommendations for things to actually do."
Games?
Come to think of it, I had tried gaming since arriving in this world. On my very first stream, even. The problem was that it just hadn't been fun. The average player skill was so low that I ended up pubstomping whether I wanted to or not, and the systems themselves were a little dull on top of that. Maybe it was the gender ratio, but everything seemed tuned for a female audience. The mobile games weren't any better. Most of them starred nothing but men, with women appearing as little more than Mob #1, and somehow that was treated as completely normal.
Then again, a world like this didn't have to produce nothing but boring games. My old world had plenty that anyone could enjoy, and among the more niche titles especially, the split was often just a matter of taste — not gender. X-Fit, which I'd played last time, was a decent example. That one was still pretty fun.
"Then could I get some game recommendations?"
......Come to think of it, I had only played X-Fit because the viewers recommended it. The poll results had been overwhelmingly in first place, if I remembered right.
"Not that. Something I can just kick back and play casually."
"A game recommendation board. Not a bad idea."
I opened my fan cafe and started setting one up.
"Alright, it's up! If you've got a game to recommend, drop it here."
Already one up?
I hit refresh immediately. There had been one weird comment in the middle there, but I decided to ignore it. The page loaded, and a single post appeared at once.
An ominous title. Then again, a trash game was a trash game no matter which world you were in — maybe I'd get a similar kind of fun out of them. Besides, I had nothing else to do until more posts showed up on the board.
I opened it. A flood of titles and short descriptions started loading in.
"Why are there so many....."
...I was probably going to spend the rest of the stream on this and then call it.
I skimmed through the list. Most of them were paid, and a few were expensive for no reason whatsoever. Still — I could make the money back, so why not try them all? Even a single weekly trip to the hospital pulled in four million won a month. What was a handful of games compared to that?
I searched for the first one and started the download. It was an ordinary horror game.
"Uh.... what is this?"
Ordinary at first glance, anyway. Under the hood it was a broken mess packed with jump scares every two minutes. To make matters worse, a black shape that popped out midway never despawned, and when I walked up to it the thing started spinning like a tornado. Honestly, that was the scariest part of the whole game.
The chat's reaction, though, was a little different from what I'd expected.
They were terrified of a game whose only trick was jump scares that made you twitch every so often. The chat had even slowed to a crawl compared to before, like they were genuinely spooked.
"Want me to turn it off if it's too scary? We can move on to the next one."
I closed the bug-riddled horror game without much ceremony.
The second I closed the game, the chat exploded back to full speed. So they really had been scared. Not a single one of those comments had shown up while I was actually playing.
I went back to the post.
"Next up is...... The Hero's Grand Adventure?"
A bug-riddled RPG this time, then.
I installed it and hit play. A modern-day 3D game loaded in. What? The controls were completely free, too — it looked like an open world. I was so thrown that I mashed the jump key and spun in circles, taking in the scenery.
Another reaction I hadn't seen coming.
"What's wrong with jumping? Doesn't everyone do that?"
......Did women usually not jump around at times like this?
I ignored it and started actually playing. The comments kept rattling around in my head, though, and I'd hit jump only to stop myself a second later. That only made the chat worse.
I did my best to ignore the chat and keep playing, and the real punchline was that the game actually had a proper classic RPG story underneath. Of course, that didn't change the fact that the mage was Assistant Manager Kim, the healer was Accounting, the thief was the department head, and the CEO was the Demon King — all in an open world.
Why were they reviewing this so seriously.
After that one, I just kept going down the list. The problem was that aside from those first two, most of them were the same flavor of bug-infested shovelware. A few were decently fun, at least.
"Aaaagh!"
Most of them were packed with cheap shots and ran so long I had no choice but to quit halfway through.
"Alright, last one..... this is School Life? Looks like a dating sim."
For the record, a dating sim in this world meant a pretty-boy romance simulation. Most of the romance games here were aimed at women, which already put me off a little.
?
"Why? What kind of game is this supposed to be?"
Ah.
I deleted the download on the spot. BL was a bit much.
It was still a surprise, though. In a world this packed with women, I'd assumed BL would be everywhere. There were already plenty of games starring nothing but men. And yet this reaction made it look like they'd just watched something they were never supposed to see.
"So what is BL, exactly?"
Asking why they didn't like it would have sounded way too suspicious, so I changed the question a little. I'd still get a real answer this way.
I skimmed the reactions and figured it out. They were treating it like NTR.
It made sense. This was a world where harems were the default — where people actively hoped to be part of one — so actual NTR landed closer to abandonment than anything else. Cheating barely even existed here. BL, on the other hand, was the story of a man falling for another man and throwing away the woman who loved him. No wonder it hit them that hard.
I left the post. After nearly four hours of playing, a lot more recommendations had piled up.
"Should we save these for later?"
"We're ending the stream."
Click.
I turned it off. All in all, the first guerrilla stream had gone pretty well.