"This meeting about staff turnover is postponed? Again?" Marjorine moans as her face turns red in a videoconference with her team, who all telecommute. "I'm about to quit if it gets postponed once more after that!"

"What do you mean?" her boss asks her. "You don't have the full picture of what you're complaining about!"

"I feel like staff turnover is making it harder for us because we constantly need to train new people so they can get up to speed! We need to know what's causing it, beyond rapid changes in skillset requirements, because I feel it's not the end of the story!" Gordon, a coworker, sighs.

It's not the first time my bosses block action on things I know employees complained about over and over. It seems that no matter what we do, the bosses don't listen to us. As my first job out of college, it could be worse, Marjo sighs as she reflects on her situation as a relatively new hire working from home. Who, only a few months into the job, feels unsatisfied about her work conditions.

So she continues to truck along dealing with the refund requests, along with calling the overdue customers on credit. Like this one:

"It has been six months since bills number..." Marjorine is about to yell at the customer about the overdue bills, what was billed on these bills, and their total amounts. "At this point, we have no choice but to hand over your case to a collection agency!"

"Collection agencies... they will hound us until we have nothing left!" the deadbeat customer whines.

"If even then, you cannot repay, I'm afraid we have no choice but to take you to court! In the meantime, just use your credit card to the extent you have room on it!" she keeps yelling louder and louder.

In which case the customer may as well go bankrupt. I guess better a small percentage of the total owed amount than nothing, but this is the kind of customers that leave me no choice but to yell at them, Marjorine starts feeling like she has done everything in her power to get the customer to pay, even in part. Even with the use of AI-generated emails as reminders.

However, she would have loved to send that customer a demand letter, here and there, but asking her boss for permission to send one was a lengthy proposition at best.

At the end of the work day, Gordon, also working from home, then texts her about an exciting new opportunity to unwind:

Gordon: You should try to enter the public beta test of RCG

Marjorine: RCG? What kind of game is this?

Gordon: Remote-Controlled Ghosts; its devs teased custom house construction, shared wardrobes, mass production of player-designed outfits on a player market and so much more

And so much more: horizontal progression under the forms of careers and skills, ghosts with personality traits and needs, like hunger, social interaction, bladder, hygiene and so on. It also includes bills and loans, but at its core, RCG is about crafting and earning money. Or so its devs publicly announced, Gordon doesn't feel like spilling all the beans, but sends her the link to the game's public beta registration.

Once Marjo registers for the open beta of the game, she waits for a while for it to download and install. After graduation from LSU, I returned home to live with my parents in Kinder so I can pay down my student debt. Which forced me to take a WFH job and the employer asked for a degree even though my work didn't use it. She then starts venting.

"What did I do to land myself in this situation where I constantly feel like my boss is actively trying to block what I feel is in the best interest of my workplace?" Marjorine whines and cries within earshot of her parents.

"Do you have an example?" her mom asks.

"I want to issue demand letters to deadbeat customers, and maybe even take them to court outright afterward, because I feel like the threat of a lawsuit might be the only way to get these customers to pay, even in part!"

"Did you consider that such lawsuits would ruin your employer's reputation, or, if they didn't, the defendants could go bankrupt?"

"I don't care if the defendant goes bankrupt! The cold, hard truth is that, if you're in dire straits and can't pay your suppliers even six months late, you're probably better off out of business!"

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"Unless the defendant operates in an industry with long collection or billing cycles, such as construction!" Marjorine's mom shouts.

Speaking of construction, my husband would probably tell her about how subcontractors can do work and not get paid for it until the general contractor is paid, Marjo's mom tries to calm herself down after a heated dispute about A/R collection practices, especially in how to deal with delinquent customers.

When dinner time comes with both parents, Marjo also vents about her day at work to her dad, even though her mom already heard it all. Her dad, apparently unaware of her employer's organizational structure, asks her a question that could shed light on her unsatisfaction.

"There are times when, yes, you want to make customers pay their unpaid bills, but you seem to be a bit brash. However, does your employer have a legal department? If so, they are the ones who send out demand letters, and even then..." Marjo's dad asks his daughter. "You must be consistent in who to send out demand letters, and when!"

"What do you mean, I should be consistent?" a distraught Marjo asks her dad. "My boss makes me feel like he doesn't care about the company! Staff turnover, slowness to respond to issues employees raise, even for their own tasks, being the main ones!"

I don't expect much, but I'm asking my boss to send demand letters to a list of delinquent customers, with the A/R aging report as an attachment, and the demand letter potential recipients highlighted, Marjorine then writes an email with the manifest of demand letter recipients on her cell phone.

But hours after dinner, when the game is done being downloaded and installed into Marjorine's computer, she is treated to a short video as a loading screen right after she logs into the public beta server of RCG.

"Welcome to the public beta test of Remote-Controlled Ghosts. I'm Adèle, on behalf of RCG's development team, I wish you a fulfilling stay in control of remote-controlled ghosts! You can make them everything you want them to be! Don't hesitate to report bugs to us!"

At this point, Marjo starts using recording software before creating her cast of characters. A dazzling array of options are given to create her characters, starting with their names, life stage, gender and pronouns.

"They even allow people to create transgender ghosts in this game?" She refrains from screaming, upon seeing the transgender options being available, but she describes and comments about the first aspects of creating characters. "Now I am curious about how a ghost being transgender will affect gameplay, so I will create one! Nay, a trans couple!"

Games allowing for same-sex romance were around for a while, but the game's developers are very woke. I guess sexual orientation will be defined in greater detail later, Marjorine is reminded of how transgender people were caught in the crossfire of the culture wars.

Then comes personality traits: does she want her character to be more outgoing, more active or lazy, more career-oriented, more impulsive, and so on.

Here she has the option to either pick traits, likes and dislikes, or turn-ons and turn-offs individually, or she can take a multiple-choice questionnaire. For this character, she spends a while mulling over personality traits that aren't likes-and-dislikes, as she pores over their description, before getting to likes-and-dislikes.

After choosing the personality traits, she gets to likes and dislikes, along with romantic turn-ons and turn-offs, both coming in several types.

Then she realizes that the options given to create her characters' bodies give her pause. Even after changing the ghost's race, she must change every major part of a character one by one apart from facial details: length and width are the main things for limbs, as well as for the neck, chest and belly. Which, in turn, affect the height and bulk of the character.

"Why is it that the devs refer to our characters as ghosts? Is this a cruel joke? This game's characters don't feel like ghosts at all!" She starts shouting at the mic. "They feel like... people!"

Her mom overhears her shout about ghosts. Upon arriving at Marjo's desk, she scolds her daughter. "Honey, horror games are no good for you!"

"Who are you to tell me what to play? I got it for free!"

I can always cut mom's intervention on video, and no one would notice, Marjorine muses as the process of creating her first character continues. She wants her character's body to fit a certain vision, and only once the body type is set can she move on with the face phase of character creation.

"There are so many options: nose bridge shape and size, eye shape, size and positioning inside the skull, skull width, jawline size, eye color, hair color and cut, and, of course, skin color!" an overjoyed Marjorine plays around her first trans character's face.

Then comes the outfitting part. However, since Marjo didn't play MAA before it closed, eight years ago, she doesn't realize that a lot of the outfits available to RCG players were in MAA. Which helps explain the abundance of headgear and gloves.

However, some of the most beloved MAA outfits are there as full-body ones (sans headgear), usually robes or dresses, while others are broken down into top, bottom and shoes. And, of course, more contemporary outfits and accessories who, together with the outfits ported from MAA, make for a dizzying case of choice paralysis. And Gordon told me that people will be able to create and mass-produce their own outfits in this game?

Once she is done creating her first trans, the screen prompts her about how many characters she has left before she hits the limit for the household when she starts creating her second trans character. Remaining character slots in household: 7.

For which she ends up using the multiple-choice questionnaire to add personality. But now that she gets the hang of creating characters, she feels much happier.