So. Dungeon Veils Interactive. It was “just a game,” but it was also much more than just a game. It was a global phenomenon and not necessarily in a good way.

Put it this way -- when DVI’s servers expanded into a new area, everyone there had to play. Or, at least, were “strongly encouraged” to do so. I don’t understand the politics behind it -- and it’s always politics behind things at that level -- but governments allocated resources and development to areas based on the performance of the players from that area.

Performance being in-game economic output taking into consideration crafting and loot drops. There was a grace period of a few weeks after an area got hooked up before governments switched over to using DVI performance rather than real-world economic and manufacturing performance. That allowed a community to build up a core of players before needing to rely on them.

And don’t ask me how it works. I’m no economist, logistics expert, or statistician. I, along with my sister and friends, am just a high school student. Sure, the basics of economy and statistics are covered in classwork, but so are a good many other things that no one ever thought would be relevant, either. So who pays attention to them in school?

Anyway, we’re from a series of little towns on the coast, and community blocks used by DVI and the government are for populations of twenty-five thousand of game-playing age. That meant server size was larger than even our whole county’s population even if you counted all the babies, little kids, and decrepit elderly in hospitals and nursing homes. Consequently, our community block, that is server, covered a pretty large geographic area.

And game-playing age isn’t just adults and older teens. Some countries out East had lowered their “virtual adult” age first to fifteen and then to thirteen in an attempt to get a larger chunk of the allocatable resources, and other governments had necessarily followed suit. So my little sister, who had just turned thirteen last week, would be considered old enough to play.

Honestly, she’d probably be better at it than most adults would. I was expecting that she’d outperform most of us even, except maybe Mika. Jocelyn was just that good.

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But all that administrative and logistics behind the scenes to bring a community server online took time, especially in a widely dispersed rural area. After all, DVI VR pods had to be installed (and manufactured and transported before they could be installed), and in many cases -- ours included -- the underlying data networks had to be significantly upgraded.

Rural places like us -- the nearest “big city” across the river was still under ten thousand people -- were the low end of the totem pole. The more densely urbanized areas had received priority in upgrading and converting to the digital economy.

But there was a benefit to not being early adopters. Unlike the big European cities and densely populated Asian areas, we weren’t going into DVI completely blind. Sure, a lot of the in-game specifics were heavily censored and redacted, but there was plenty of basic information about character creation, skills, and so on available. We just hadn’t bothered learning about it until it had become relevant. Well, maybe Naomi or Susie had, but the rest of us were just teens doing teen things.

Oh, and lest you think that the game is all there was to do. No, it may supplant allocation of resources at the government level, but a community’s normal economic activity still continued. Day-to-day life still continued. The VR pods replaced beds and DVI replaced sleep -- and as it’s been going on in Europe for over two years, and most of the rest of the higher-density populated areas for over a year, there’s no apparent health problems by playing games while asleep. Just fancy dreaming, with awake-time consequences.

In order to be “equitable,” the game servers were only accessible at night, also. DVI regulated game time from between 10 pm and 6 am, another reason community servers were small and local. I don’t know what they did for the people like cops and firefighters that had to work nights. Nor for parents of little kids, neither.

So, with basically the whole world playing -- minus some of us rural areas still -- you can see why a large chunk of people were on the Path of Self rather than choosing a specific race, a specific class, or letting fate give them something random. Most players weren’t coming at it from a history of being gamers. And even people who gamed, most of them were content with being a sword-swinging or spell-flinging version of themselves.

And those paths were pretty darn arbitrary, too. With only one character per player, high randomness, and extremely limited rerolls, even a lot of people who had wanted to be on a different path had ended up on the Path of Self.

It wasn’t really fair, but no one ever successfully claimed that life was fair.