The Lonely Game Maker

You are Oscar Knox, a young man of 24, who has succeeded in his dreams and aspirations.

As you stand as a very successful indie game developer. An, as a result, you have created a series of video games that have brought you a great deal of wealth and a decent amount of fame. Yet, despite your wealth, you remain a very humble and frugal person. Whereas others would’ve spent their wealth on frivolous things such as expensive cars and decadently luxurious homes.

You have instead opted to save the majority of your wealth, carefully spending it, investing it, and as a result, have been living off the interest of your large fortune. That’s not to say you haven’t spent your money on a rather lovely and large home. It’s just that you haven’t spent money on multiple homes, instead opting to only have one large mansion to call your own. Filling it to the brim with different knickknacks, objects, and souvenirs collected from your many years of traveling across the globe.

Yet despite all of your wealth, all of your fame, you still lack one thing in your life. That being the companionship of another or, to put it more bluntly, love.

This is unfortunately due to your own personality and background. As you grew up as one of the many different military brats whose parents served in the Army. Growing up, you had the fantastic opportunity to see the world as you travel from place to place with your parents. Yet this opportunity came with a severe drawback, that being your inability to keep friends. As every two years of your parents would have to move to a new military base that would sometimes be across the world.

This inability to keep friends eventually began to shape your personality as you slowly began to give up on the possibility of having friends. As you saw such a thing as an act of futility, after all, what was the point of making friends that you would never see again two years from now?

Combine this with a rather messy divorce between your two parents, and you were understandably jaded about relationships. Which certainly did not help you when you began to become an adult. As you were left socially awkward at times and emotionally distant to those who did not know you. That said, this emotional distance that you had gained had also given you a great deal of opportunity to learn from the mistakes of others. As you had taken up the hobby of people watching, as well as reading, and eventually what would become your job, video games.

It was through this hobby, as well as your other pastimes of entertainment. That did you discover repeating patterns within people and, more importantly, how to be careful about who you trusted with what information. Yet, this wisdom came with a price as it made it far more challenging to relate to those within your own age group. As your life experiences due to mature far faster than those around you, leaving you with a far more stoic, if not sarcastic, personality.

That said, it was this personality, this stoicism, that drove you forward to succeed where others would not. As you had the drive to chase after your dreams, yet when you succeeded. The loneliness that surrounded you only became even more potent.

As you had seen, what people would be willing to do for money, what masks they would be ready to wear to get what they want. You wanted actual friends, not sycophants and yes-men. You wanted genuine love, not a deceitful lust given to you by those who are only interested in your fame and fortune.

Yet this want, this need inside of you, made you all the more hesitant to actually begin interacting with people. As despite your best efforts to remain anonymous, that fear in the back of your mind always prickled forth. It was paranoia at its best, and your family often noted that as well. They were worried, and they only wanted the best for you as they always had.

This is why after a series of long discussions with your parents and your grandparents, you finally agreed to start putting yourself out there and to the world. Yet as you began to think about going out into the world to find genuine love, you discovered a rather odd email show up on your computer one night.

It was from a dating website called “Cupid’s wishes,” or at the very least, that’s what you assumed it was. You weren’t exactly sure how to feel about using such an unknown and possibly sketchy dating website to begin your first foray into love. Yet, perhaps it was not the worst possible thing you could do starting off.

After all, what was the worst that could happen outside of you losing a computer?

So, accepting the web link from the email and creating an account. You began to search through the many different matches that were available to you, and you found that they were quite a lot of them. Yet as you are about to begin your own personal search, the screen on your computer went black. An despite your efforts to reboot your computer, nothing happened.

You knew it was too good to be true, and you weren’t surprised at all at the fact that the website was a scam. Luckily, this was an old computer that didn’t have anything of value on you. So, with a heavy sigh, you put the laptop down and began to get ready to go to bed.

Yet as you did so, you completely missed the computer turning back on with it, soon displaying a single red heart with the words matchmaking above it and in progress below it…

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