Bringing Cultural Exports to the Cyber World

The large-scale VR multiplayer game Mental Ruins attracted widespread attention as soon as its development was announced. But despite having mastered the art of creating hype by withholding information, the game held no closed beta. Instead, it invited players to sign up, then randomly selected ten thousand people for its first public beta.

[Warning, this is a game called REAL]

[You will seek entertainment in this lifeless world]

[Technology that only exists in fantasy]

[Please bring new life to this world]

[Revivalist --1128]

The flurry of electronic sounds and flashing images sent Miao Yu’s expectations soaring. She eagerly clicked “Agree and Start Game.” At the same time, nearly ten thousand players across the globe began a revolution called “Revival.”

[Main quest: ???]

[Quest description: This is a server-wide quest. You must first complete the prerequisite quest, “A Spark in the Darkness.”]

[Quest reward: Return to the world]

[Shocking!! A cyber society with advanced technology has social problems like these]

[You’re not a true Revivalist if you don’t repost. These secrets are inside]

[Let’s discuss: How many people would it take to make a whole new anime by hand?]

[I can’t spend another day in this world without games!!!]

[Reasonable discussion: Is it possible to create a god in a cyber world? DM me if interested]

Miao Yu sat in her cramped, shabby rental room, eating instant noodles that had gone soggy, and fell silent as she looked at the player forum.

“To be fair, it’s all cultural exports. Anime and games are fine, so why can’t my idol debut? Isn’t this what I do for a living?!”

[Revivalist1128: Help! Can someone teach me how to go from zero to holding a concert?]

[Revivalist0516: Hey, is the person above holding a concert? That’s so cool! Let me ask, are there any friends who want to write a novel with me?]

[Revivalist1228: Recruiting a film director, actors, screenwriter, producer, post-production team, lighting crew, art designer...]

For the server-wide quest, all the players summoned a level of dedication to studying that they’d never shown for their college entrance exams, frantically learning all sorts of things whenever they traveled back to the real world. Back in the cyber world, Miao Yu had to spend the day as a cheap laborer for the capitalists, a lowly corporate drone. At night, she studied how to put on a concert that would draw the whole world’s attention in a place where entertainment was banned. Come on, singing on top of an aircraft is seriously cool!

In this desolate land of extreme technological advancement and enormous wealth disparity, where people at the bottom were numb and empty, stripped of all spiritual strength, players from the real world would launch a cultural revival, bringing new life to this spiritually ravaged world and bringing utopia to a dystopian society.

[Warnings: Not a conventional female-led story. Not all the characters are women, and I’m not sure what the gender ratio will be. I’ll write whatever comes to mind.]

[I'm not a professional, and much of the information comes from Baidu. Please don’t take it too seriously.]

[If you don’t like it, you can leave. Please don’t go out of your way to leave bad reviews. It’s better for both of us. Kisses.]

Theme: Giving the cyber world a little taste of cultural shock