Teen novel blurring the line between virtual gaming and reality

Question

I am trying to identify a book I read in my teens. It was most likely released around the mid 2000s to mid 2010s if I remember correctly.

I remember that the main character was a male lead who moves into a new high school where virtual reality consoles are the trendiest thing. He ends up befriending a random kid from his class who had the latest VR console. We find out that while on the subway to school this second kid was gifted the console to him from a mysterious figure who had a guitar on his back that wasn't plugged into anything, the mysterious figure leaves him a card to the arcade he owns and then leaves. ( This second kid also had a drunk miner dad who was off planet for half the story, hence why he holes up in his VR console) Eventually the second kid gets addicted to the game and starts thinking that he's still in the game even once he's no longer playing it and starts going mental during a school lesson. He thinks he's still playing the FPS game in VR and the line between VR and reality starts blurring. So the story unfolds where the main male lead battles to get his friend out of this VR trance and along with him and another female lead who becomes the romantic interest to the main character all try to find this mysterious figure who keeps giving out these consoles.

Definitely a YA novel.

Answer 1

Seems a longshot. You could check in case it is the novelisation of Existenz. The novel was by Christopher Priest.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/962303.eXistenZ

A world where fantasy is more real than life itself.You are in a society where game designers are superstars and players can organically enter their favorite games. . . . A society where no one is more desired than Allegra Geller, the hip gaming goddess whose latest system, eXistenZ, takes a quantum leap beyond anything ever imagined--tapping so deeply into its users' fears and desires that it blurs the boundaries of reality.

Fleeing an assassination attempt from Anti-eXistenZialists determined to destroy the game and its creator, Allegra finds an ally in Ted Pikul, a young executive turned novice security guard sworn to protect her. Seeking shelter within her creation, Allegra persuades Ted to play the game, and the fugitives find themselves in a phantasmagoric world where existence ends and eXistenZ begins, a fantastic place where nothing is as it seems and the villains are all too real--and all too deadly.

Now a major motion picture from Dimension Films, written and directed by David Cronenberg and starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, and Ian Holm.