212 pages; softcover.

Yoshio is a thirty-year-old shut-in with no job and no prospects, still living at home after all these years. His mundane life is suddenly interrupted when he receives a copy of "The Village of Fate," an experimental game with graphics and A.I. like nothing he's ever seen before. In the game, he takes on the role of a guardian deity who watches over the people of a new village-but he finds that the game characters are so intelligent, so reactive, so human that he starts to wonder if they might somehow be real people. Through his connection to their strangely vivid lives, Yoshio begins to discover the brightness that had been missing from his own existence.