Entry #0: Player Profile

Name: Mike

Level: 51

Class: CEO / People Pleaser

Current Status: Buffer Underrun

On paper, I won.

That’s what they tell me at the dinner parties Heather drags me to. They look at the suit, the watch, the company that processes ninety million appointments a year, and they nod. "You made it, Mike. You’re living the dream."

They don’t know that the dream feels a lot like a long flight in a middle seat.

I run a healthtech company here in the city. We aren’t a "Unicorn." Unicorns are magical and rare. We are a draft horse. We pull a heavy plow through the mud of healthcare bureaucracy, day after day.

My problem isn't the technology; it's the people who pay for it. I have clients who think "innovation" is just a buzzword they can paste onto a PowerPoint slide to look smart. They are vampires of time. They schedule meetings to discuss the agenda for the next meeting. They want the future, but they want it to look exactly like the past, just slightly faster.

I am an immigrant. I came here with Heather when Millie was twelve and Miles was eight. We carried four suitcases and the kind of terror that makes you work eighteen hours a day because you think the ground is going to open up and swallow you if you stop.

Now, the kids are grown. Millie is in marketing at the big telecom giant, drowning in "customer churn" and corporate speak. Miles is studying engineering, playing music, and riding a sport bike that screams at 12,000 RPM—he found the speed I lost somewhere along the way.

Heather is the architect of our sanctuary. She found a patch of wild dirt by a lake and designed a house from scratch. It’s beautiful. We drive back and forth, escaping the city whenever we can.

I always think the Lake House will fix me. I think the water and the trees will wash the noise away. But they don't. I sit on the deck, looking at paradise, but my phone is in my pocket, vibrating like a bomb. The stress packs its own suitcase. The burnout follows me down the highway. I feel slightly better there, lighter maybe, but the cage is inside my ribs, not in the city.

Me? I am a people pleaser. It is a terminal condition. I say "yes" when I want to scream "no." I smile when I want to flip the table. I feel guilty when I sit still.

So I bought Rocky.

He’s a Royal Enfield Meteor 350. Stellar Black. He isn’t fast like Miles’s bike. He shakes. He rattles. He smells like hot iron and oil. When I am on Rocky, I cannot answer the phone. The vibration of the single-cylinder engine is the only thing that drowns out the noise in my head.

And late at night, when the house is quiet and the guilt is sleeping, I build The Game.

It’s called Soft & Sticky. It’s stupid. It’s about jelly candies trying to climb out of a glass jar. But it’s not really about candy. It’s about me. It’s about the "Filler Jellies"—the grey, tasteless weights that cling to you and drag you down.

I have a dream. A small seaside village in Europe. Linen shirt. Sandals. Buying bread in the morning and having nowhere to be.

But right now, I am here. In the cage I built, looking for the door, one line of code at a time.