A Game She Might Actually Be Good At
"Shinye unnie, what are we doing next? Are you ending the stream?"
"Should we?"
"Jiyoung wants to wrap up, though. We're ending the stream."
"What? I wasn't planning on ending."
"Yeah? Then should we try one more?"
The word VR hit me like a switch. I immediately drifted my cursor over toward that username's timeout button.
Who did they think they were, bringing an acrophobia game anywhere near me?
They were getting a timeout for that.
"Sorry, what kind of game?"
"Okay, I jumped to conclusions this time. Sorry. For the record, I didn't actually click it."
"There's a game Jiyoung would be good at, too."
"No matter what I try, it takes forever to learn and I still can't get the hang of it. But I just can't bring myself to quit."
"There is one game I think you'd actually be good at."
"Really? There's a game like that? How come I don't know about it?"
"Chat, what game do you think Jiyoung would be good at?"
"It's not like there's nothing Jiyoung could be good at."
"I've never been good at a game in my life. I get a little better if I play long enough, but…"
"I've never actually seen you play this one, but I'm certain you'd be good at it."
"What game is it that you're so sure?"
"You might even be better at it than I am."
"If it's that game, yeah — she actually might have a shot."
"Shinye unnie, you know about this too?"
"Of course. Mina came over to my place first, so I already checked whether we had it."
Mina had told me she'd stopped by Shinye unnie's house before I arrived. They lived close enough that it made sense for her to drop in first.
A game I might be better at than Mina…
Anything physical was absolutely out of the question. Mina's athletic ability didn't just clear the average for girls — it sat comfortably above the average for guys. There was no universe in which I could beat her at that.
Something that used your head? I couldn't win there either. How was I supposed to outthink someone who'd taken first in the entire school on classwork alone?
Don't tell me it was a game where being short was an advantage?
Just in case, I leaned in and whispered the question to Mina.
"Absolutely not. There's no way a game like that exists. If it did, I'd have ordered one for our house on the spot."
"Ah. Okay, never mind. Now I'm really curious what it is."
"Chat, what do you think the game is?"
"Honestly, it's not a famous one, so I don't think you'll guess it."
"I believe in you, chat. I think you'll get it."
"I'm starting to want to mute those two."
I hurried to time both of them out for ten minutes.
There was no way I'd be good at the games I hated most. Horror games, same as anything involving heights, were the last things I ever wanted to play. I had no idea why anyone would try to put someone through a game designed to torment them.
The three games of talent. The ones people called, "Can you even see that?"
Rhythm games. Fighting games. Shooting games.
I couldn't even play regular games. There was no chance I'd be good at one of those three.
Fighting games were about blocking your opponent's attacks and landing your own. Easy to say. Brutally hard to do. Your defense had to change depending on how they came at you, which meant reading their mind or reacting to what you saw in real time. You needed overwhelming dynamic vision and reaction speed — the kind you were born with, not the kind you ground out in practice.
Animal Kingdom's Arena was basically a fighting game too. Same mind games, same eyes, same reflexes.
Shooting games were exactly what they sounded like: dodge the bullets. The further you got, the more the screen filled with a storm of projectiles. You had to memorize patterns and react to what you saw. Pattern memorization you could grind out eventually. The problem was the random barrages you couldn't memorize your way through. Bullets screaming in at high speed from unpredictable angles? I was never dodging those on skill alone.
And finally, rhythm games.
Notes raining down at ridiculous speed that you had to hit on timing. I'd watched people play them at arcades before, and all I could think was, how is anyone pressing buttons that fast?
I had zero confidence in any of the three. The taxi game we'd just played would honestly have been easier — and chat had prescribed me a driving ban. A game easier than the three talent games, and I'd still needed a medical order to stay off the wheel.
I really had no talent at all, did I?
"I didn't think anyone would actually get it. I'll count it even if you don't know the title."
"If you'd just said rhythm game, that wouldn't have been the answer. But you said piano-based, so I'll give it to you."
"A while back they released a digital piano with a built-in rhythm game mode. Then they put out a real piano-based version, so I bought it on the spot."
"It has things in common with rhythm games, too. In a rhythm game you play by watching the notes come down, and with this you play by watching the notes — or the sheet music."
"I thought it was a game. I figured I could just learn it the way you'd learn a rhythm game. Turns out if you want to play it properly, you have to learn piano first."
"Starting an eighty-eight-key rhythm game the way you'd start any other rhythm game would be brutal."
A rhythm game built on a piano?
What even is that?