She's met the people in her dorm already but that's not nearly enough. One of the points of even being here at all is networking, right? Right. And the fact that the dom toward whom she's making a beeline right now is cute as a button has nothing to do with it. Nope.
"Excuse me?" she asks, managing to sound very small despite standing up while he's sitting down. "Is this seat taken?"
"...I could probably show you some games later. PC games, I don't have a console here, so they're mostly single-player."
"Uh, if you want, that is."
"I'd love that! And I could probably just watch you play for a bit, to learn the basics—I'm a quick learner."
"Sounds like fun! Except games are a very interactive thing, it's really better to play them yourself than to watch people play them I think... Hmm, what's a good first game... Portal? It involves lots of clever puzzles and an insane switch-or-nondynamic AI. "
"...well that sounds like loads of fun. Is the AI presented in a specifically roleless way or is it just ambiguous?"
"It's pretty ambiguous. Her actions are kind of dom-ish but there are narrative things that hint at being subby and nothing definitive. The player character is left vague too, so you can pretend she's whichever role you are. Or aren't."
"That sounds really cool. I wouldn't expect a first game recommendation to already have such good representation."
"I say it's a good first game because the controls aren't complicated and they don't expect you to already recognize as much stuff... Like, a green bar above a character's head that's slowly turning red, what does it mean? The game assumes you know it's how much you can get hit until you die and doesn't explain it. Because a green bar turning red is almost always health. Portal doesn't do things like that as much, I think."
"Huh. I think the green red thing would be—obvious enough after a bit? But maybe not fast enough that I wouldn't die once before it was obvious. Still, yeah, puzzle game with ambiguously-roled AI sounds like just my thing."
"Cool. So I'll bring my laptop next time I show up here and let you use it? Or what?"
"I think the librarian will actually murder us if we make too much noise here. We could just go to the garden behind the school, if you get WiFi there, or one of our rooms."
"They have WiFi out there? I'll have to try that."
"...Uh. My room is probably safer from rain though."
"They have WiFi pretty much everywhere, perks of an Eclipsed school, didn't you read the brochures?" he says, grinning. "Sure, your room sounds fine. I'm not off for a couple hours more though."
Shrug. "I have studying to pretend to do. See you then." He gives a room number before heading back out, having returned his book.
He goes and opens it, carrying his laptop. "Hello again. The game I wanted to show you is but one click away."
"I wait with bated breath for the wondrous world you're about to show me."
"Alright then? Well, you said you wanted to see me do the basics, but I think it really is better to do the intro scene yourself. I'll show you the most important tricks after that."
And here's the computer! "It does occur to me that a single-player game is not necessarily the best to socialize around. You might be too busy playing to chat."
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