Three virtual idols play a full-dive punishment game.

Full-dive gaming.

The concept had a long, storied lineage. It’s earliest ancestor, augmented reality, was confined to a tiny screen, using the camera of a device to project its content over a live video capture. When projecting that content into reality became a dead end, others sought to move the screen instead- giving rise to virtual reality. With the right sensors, screen placement, and complete overtaking of one’s sight with a headset, one could immerse themselves in a much more complete experience- though their bodies remained rooted in real space. Absorbing and refining the motion controls of yesteryear, they made good on their promises of immersion.

Although they could wholly control sight and sound, and could provide some additional immersion through haptic feedback, moving about naturally was an impossibility. Changing one’s own form was not possible. Only so many peripheral bits of technology were worth the investment. Faced with yet another dead end, pioneers once again turned inward. What could not be recreated could, at least, be simulated.

With the advent of simulated reality, it became possible to fully transfer one’s senses into a digital world. There were, naturally, limitations- but for the first time, it was the possibilities that outweighed the limitations. It became possible to move, to taste and smell, to even feel a game world, first hand. As the only vehicle for this was sensory input, players could be anything, do anything they put their mind to- at least, within the confines of these ever-expanding worlds. Simple, dream-like places where simulation was thin slowly became something more like astral projection- though no matter how carefully a developer crafted their world and its rules, made clever on-the-fly alterations to keep players from feeling a disconnect with their player-character avatars, or accounted for all the other little details that might remind a player of their true reality, some things remained impossible. The sensory link to reality had been broken- but the physical and mental ones remained.

For some, that limitation was still a dead end- and as they had before, they set out to find a new path forward. Full-Dive Reality was born of their efforts. At first, the process of building a virtual hypervisor shell around one’s mind, sending their consciousness through to a digital world with whatever alterations were required on the digital “version” only, giving them an unquestioningly “real” experience, only to leave them with nothing more than the memory of it on their physical side seconds later was seen as incredibly dangerous, playing god, and possibly a war crime.

That was before people figured out they could turn themselves into an anime girl.

Naturally, that wasn’t the only thing people did or wanted to do, but it was a significant one. Technically speaking, people had been not just doing it, but doing it in a commercially viable way ever since the peak of virtual reality. The dream held all the way back then- back in a dark time when governments thought it was a good idea to make streaming a felony or argue about what a country was called- could finally be made manifest.

The fact that these games could happen in real-life seconds, involve hours of content not just directly recorded but replayable as a spectator, and be uploaded essentially as soon as they were complete made humanity’s already exponential content generation balloon to unfathomable levels. Anything one could imagine probably existed in some way or another.

That said, certain specific kinds of entertainment were always in high demand on Inryo.

-

Project 3K was one of the most popular games for full-dive systems, though it hadn’t started out that way. In fact, it’s earliest form wasn’t even as a game- rather, as a tech-demo like codebase that could generate complex environments on the fly. That code was leaked to the public, where a second development team snapped it up and built a simple yet robust shooter engine on top of it.

Then, that code got leaked a second time, and there was an explosion of content. Dozens of branching code-bases, all adding features and content from hundreds of different independent developers, sprang up overnight. Tools to streamline the creation process brought even more people on board, and the things they created brought more people to try them out, in a rapid and ceaseless cycle.

Some people pit home-brewed AI teams against one another, and casted those matches live as though it were a tournament. Others used the engine to tell wholly emergent stories, introducing characters in simulated “perma-****” runs. There were grand strategy variants, base-building survival versions, deathmatches and battle royales and game modes that simply defied a singular title that could fully explain them. With custom settings menus, it was possible to custom-tailor a ruleset for nearly anything, on the fly.

That was precisely what three extra-popular, extra-bottomheavy Hyper Idols were doing for their latest Punishment Game stream. Although that title told the audience little to nothing about the specific rules of the game, it was sufficient to explain what they were trying to do- and what these three virtual girls would undoubtedly be up against.

The same thing they were always “up against”. Drinks.