Hi All...I need a bit of help and thought the good folks here might be able to fill a knowledge gap or three for me. I'm writing a character who is a 20 year old guy, a Brit from London. I'm writing him as a working in a supermarket but he has some reasonably high level tech skills. This is where my severe lack of IT knowledge is letting me down. What I need some help with is: • Online games he can play and have friends via those games, plus cheat sheets/phrases for said game/s that I can drop in the narrative. • A way he can help an IT illiterate woman he is trying to impress. Perhaps something fairly simple around the home or with her online presence, I don't know really, hence why I need help. Phrases and words relevant to this that I can use in the narrative would be so helpful. • A job he can do from home with his tech skills. The woman he impresses wants to help set him up to use his skills and earn some money, what would be a good career he could do from home with a little help from this woman, maybe she can pay for his gear? Or is there another way she can help get him started monetising his skills? Essentially the story is about a young guy who lacks confidence and is taken under the wing of a thirty something woman who helps him come out of his shell.
Here is a messy list of ideas. I hope something in it is useful. Online games that could have spreadsheets and some relevant dialogue: Dungeons and Dragons ("I created a spreadsheet calculating the best ability to take when I level up. Guess who is a tavern-brawler barbarian!"), World of Warcraft ("According my calcs, guys, we have like a 0.3333% of actually surviving this raid."), EVE Online ("I spent eight hours on Excel just calculating the best time to sell my ore according to fluctuating supply and demand... and then I lost it all anyways to a fleet of space pirates.") Ways that some techy person could help a partner: Hooking up a printer. Clearing browser search history ("Ah, you may have deleted your browser search history, but your search requests are still totally visible via your router's traffic log. Why did you google '[insert relevant fetish here]'?" Setting up a firewall/VPN Some good tech jobs that some young people have tremendous success in. Web development. Get hired by companies to make them cool looking and accessible websites that display products and information. An older partner may know people who own big businesses that have a shitty website that needs improvement. IT work (employed by a single company usually, typically helps coworkers or customers with troubleshooting software or hardware). Really not flashy, but can be used to lean into nerdier tropes. Here's a funny line: "I'm a 'full stack' developer... that means I can do front-end and back-end work... Huh? That's not what I meant!" Game development. Maybe they made an app or game used by millions of people. A single, talented programmer could be making millions at that age if they had the right idea and worked hard. It could be a NSFW game, and the older partner helps them get the sex scenes accurate, teaching them how to make the game more realistic.
You could also make up a fictitious game. If the game doesn't exist, you have many more opportunities to incorporate various special features that you would like to have in your "ideal" game.
