Echtzeitalter (Realtimes) by Tonio Schachinger (2023)

The Marianum in Vienna has been one of Austria’s elite boarding schools for as long as anyone can remember. Till Kokorda doesn’t expect much from the school when he starts fifth grade there, but he quickly learns how hard the school can be because of his form teacher, the so-called Dolinar. The Dolinar teaches German and has a long-standing reputation as the strictest teacher the school has ever seen: Students are punished harshly for even the smallest of mistakes, or even for not having the same opinion as him. Students who are bad in school and particularly those who struggle with German are constantly ridiculed. Sometimes the Dolinar is visited by former students, which fills his current students who suffer under him with disgust.

Till’s biggest concern is to not attract too much attention, and he manages to be average in everything that he does, except for one thing: Till has a passion for the PC game Age of Empires 2 and quickly spends most of his spare time in front of the computer. He even makes a friend, Georg, and they spend most of the school’s skiing trip in their room, playing AoE2, as they call it. Till manages to become supervisor of the computer room and spends all of his spare time at school getting better and better. The game also helps him through his parent’s divorce and his father’s sudden death of cancer when Till is in the ninth grade. Till’s mother is concerned about the amount of time he spends gaming but doesn’t know how to breach the topic since she barely knows anything about gaming.

Till’s first years at school pass mostly uneventful with few exceptions, for example when he forgets his edition of BRIGITTA for German class, and he and some other boys who’ve also forgotten it make a plan to escape the school grounds to buy it in a nearby bookshop. Meanwhile Till has become internationally recognized in the AoE2-scene and tries to explain it to his mother by showing her the stream of an American Youtuber talking about Till’s gameplay. He doesn’t realize that his mother, who doesn’t even understand the concept of livestreaming, much less of AoE2, can barely follow him. Till even attends Gamescom in Cologne where he plays against others live.