Alex and Jason emerged onto the virtualization mat in the real world.  Jason frowned furiously while Alex was still chuckling.

"I'm going to bed," Jason announced.

"What?" Alex complained.  "No, wait, what?  Come on, dude, you were supposed to teach me about this virtual realm."

Jason snorted and said, "It looks like you've got a handle on it already.  Besides, it's like 2 in the morning.  Unlike some people, I have classes in the morning."

Alex pouted.  "Oh come on, man."

Jason sighed.  "All right, all right.  I'll walk you through it tomorrow, when I have some free time, but right now I need to get some sleep or I'm gonna be a zombie tomorrow."

"Wait, like, a real zombie? Or is that just a figure of speech?"

Jason stared at Alex with a deadpan, unamused expression.

"Right, figure of speech," Alex said.

Jason left the room.

Alex stared at the virtualization pad.  "You know, Jason had the right idea," he said to himself.  "I should go to bed and get some sleep."

Alex walked over to the server farm.  "Buuuuut," he said, "I'm not gonna do that, am I?  No I'm not.  Because that would be no fun."  Alex grinned and stepped up to the keyboard.

> connect to Primary Virtual Realm.

WARNING: user has limited privileges on server 'Primary Virtual Realm'.  Server-side mods disallowed.  Limited user-side mods allowed.

Alex sighed. "Of course, nothing can just be randomly good.  Well, let's see what I can do."

> list allowed mods

1) Creative_items

2) Minimap

3) Optic_Zoom

4) Recipe_list

5) Sane_HUDs

6) User_peek

7) user_permissions

Enable mods? (1-6, "all")

> all

Mods enabled: creative-mode items, minimap in HUD, optical magnification options, recipe list in HUD, sane heads-up dispays, observe user statistics, lock and unlock personal user permissions.

Alex frowned.  "Why does that sound so familiar?" he wondered to himself.  "Oh, well.  Let's get this train wreck a-rolling!"

Alex skipped over to the virtualization pad and hopped onto it, disappearing with a blinding white light.

When his eyes cleared Alex's jaws dropped.  In front of him was an incredibly familiar heads-up display; a semi-transparent set of indicators that displayed various aspects of Alex's character.  Out of instinct Alex tapped an elaborate symbol that looked similar to a Biohazard warning, with curved spines emanating from a central core.  A very familiar window popped up, showing what looked like the inside of a red velvet container designed to hold three small orbs.  Each orb was connected to at least one other orb by a linear depression in the red velvet.  There were only 3 slots for orbs, but Alex knew that as he advanced through levels the number of orbs required would increase, as would the lines connecting them into more intricate patterns.

Alex closed out the window and opened another menu.  This one was an inventory showing everything that Alex's character was holding: stack upon stack of common and rare building materials.  Each one was depicted in his inventory as a cube, with only the coloring to differentiate between the types.

Alex chuckled.  "It's Glitch Festival.  It's Glitch Festival!  Ah hah hah haaah!"  Alex laughed hysterically.

Eventually Alex calmed down.  "Hoo," he said. "I'm glad Jason isn't around to see me freak out like this.  He'd never let me live it down."

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

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5 years ago, from Alex's perspective, a game came out named Glitch Festival.  It was coded by somebody who went by the online handle "Naomi" who posted in broken English.  He was almost certainly not Japanese, but nobody could agree where he was really from.  Some people suspected India.  Others, China.  A few thought he was an American or Englishman just having a laugh at everybody.  Regardless, he was a dysfunctional genius.  His game, Glitch Festival, was a broken, buggy mess that many, many people loved to play.  At its peak one in four people had heard of it.  Every few months Naomi would release patches that were supposed to fix existing bugs.  They never did.  The 4.5 update, for example, made the Heads-up Display invisible unless you clicked a certain spot on the screen a number of times.  Even with that, the game would crash about 1 in 5 times you tried to enable the HUD.  The 4.5.1 patch didn't fix the HUD, it just prevented the game from crashing.  A lot of the patches were like this; they didn't remove the bug, they just prevented the bug from crashing the game.

If you didn't know about the eccentricities of the game, it was a confusing mess.  If you did know all the ins and outs of the system, though, you became part of an in-group that got to lord your knowledge over the newbies.

In Glitch Festival everything is made of 3d bricks that you can harvest by punching them enough times.  The core gameplay was revolutionary; nobody had ever heard of a game like this before.  Subsequent updates included monsters, villager NPCs, and a xianxia-inspired system of level-grinding.  All players started at level 1 of the Green Jade realm and moved up the ranks by "fusing" with monster cores; placing them in the relevant window and permanently absorbing their strength.  Each realm increased a character's battle strength, and a character in a higher realm could almost always defeat a lower-ranked opponent.

Moving through the realms had a chance of failure.  The more powerful the rank, the higher the chance of failure.  Failure to advance would completely waste the materials gathered if the player didn't know the trick to it. And there was always a trick to it.  Nobody could decide if it was intentional on Naomi's part, or if the code just happened to bug out in certain ways, but there was always some obscure combination of events that would combine to ensure a 100% success rate.  

Alex had memorized all of them.  He had wasted a large part of his life sucked into Glitch Festival, but he never thought in his wildest dreams that that knowledge would come in handy again.

Alex checked his inventory.  No monster cores.  Not very surprising, really.  His inventory was full because of a mod that re-enabled the normally disabled "creative mode" items, but creative mode was removed before the introduction of the levelling system, so it wouldn't have any monster cores.

Alex went to his crafting window and broke down a few of his emerald cubes into free-standing emeralds.  Then he converted these into weapons and armor.  He then placed Glass, Refined Silver, and Refined Gold onto the crafting grid, creating a full-size mirror.  He placed it on the ground and examined himself in the reflection.  Emerald helmet, emerald armor, emerald boots, emerald sword.  Flashy, but effective.  He swung the sword experimentally.  The reflection lagged behind by about a second.

Alex chuckled.  "This is definitely Glitch Festival.  Now let's find some monster cores."