Introduction The first novel by poet Shim Mina, author of the The Young Lady and Bread “I want to make something beautiful.” She joined a video game company barely knowing what a video game is and endured the infinite loop of competition, all for one single reason: to make beautiful games! Yoora is a new hire at Kiko Games, a dream workplace for anyone with a love for videogames. Problem is, Yoora knows nothing about gaming. Undeterred by warnings that she is putting her career at risk by entering a game company without knowing a thing about video games, Yoora fearlessly sets foot in Kiko Games. To Yoora, who experienced rejection after rejection from job applications after graduating with a degree in French literature, Kiko Games is a rare opportunity dropped in her lap. Considering herself lucky to have snagged a job in this dog-eat-dog world, Yoora tries to leverage this chance into a career as a project manager, but this world consisting of the concentrated “pastimes and psychoses of Homo sapiens” fills her with an incredible sense of vertigo. Yoora cycles through several roles in an attempt to pull her weight, being called at various points a game designer, a game planner, and a game mentor. But as her family feared, Yoora ends up just carrying out a series of menial tasks, the eternal outsider of Kiko Games. From the perspective of someone unable to summon up a genuine love for Kiko’s games, the sights of the company are bizarre indeed: there are the developers come into work with dark circles from gaming all night, the designers who devote all their efforts to modeling the vastness of space in the highest resolution and then jump right into pouring everything they have into modeling the motions of its bombardment and destruction, and Hotkey, the core department of the company that oversees it all. Yoora begins to wonder what it was that she truly wanted to do. There were things she, too, wished for. Art. Beautiful things. Yoora resolves to withstand life at Kiko Games in order to try to create her own unique game of literary and artistic merit. Will she succeed? Excerpt “Why am I so bad at games? It’s simple. It’s because gaming isn’t my pastime of choice. But Kiko is, over all else, a palace for pastimes, of pastimes. A place that gathers together people whose pastimes are their talents, and a place that hopes that the same will become true for everyone else in the world, and a place where the idea of ‘doing what you love’ is considered the greatest workplace benefit of all.” Review How might we prescribe a genre for this novel? There are WASD keys involved, so maybe an FPS (first-person shooter). A time loop game, in which in the course of retreading again and again your path to and from work your everyday life slowly begins to take an undesired turn. A raising simulation game where you level up from gamephobe to gamer, from gamer to game creator. Beware that you’ll be launched into hard mode as soon as you open the book. After all, this is life, not a game. —Park Seoryeon (Novelist) A game where no one fights and no one gets hurt. But a fun game. A game in which “you stroll about for as long as you want to feel the wind on your face.” The reader comes to quietly root for the beauty Yoora aims to create. You’ll start out snickering at the author’s black humor, but you’ll find yourself crying along the way. In a sense, Shim Mina has created a beautiful game by the name of Kiko Games. — Moon Bo Young (Poet)