The Player of Games (Culture, #2)

by Iain M. Banks

The better I do the worse things get because the more I have to lose.”

Gurgeh never ceased to be fascinated by the way a society’s games revealed so much about its ethos, its philosophy, its very soul.

“All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules.

all the best mechanistic games—those which can be played in any sense ‘perfectly,’ such as grid, Prallian scope, ’nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions—can be traced to civilizations lacking a relativistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies.

there is nothing intellectually inferior about using your hands to build something as opposed to using only your brain.

It struck him as strange that despite the Empire’s obvious, if limited, technological sophistication, its formal side remained so entrenched in the past.

It’s insurance. You heard of that? No? Never mind. It’s like gambling in reverse.”

the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them.

“Your ships think they’re sentient!” Hamin chuckled. “A common delusion shared by some of our human citizens.”

Hamin thought this must take all the fun out of things. Didn’t the Culture forbid anything?

We are what we do, not what we think. Only the interactions count (there is no problem with free will here; that’s not incompatible with believing your actions define you). And what is free will anyway? Chance. The random factor. If one is not ultimately predictable, then of course that’s all it can be. I get so frustrated with people who can’t see this!

Strength in depth; redundancy; over-design. You know the Culture’s philosophy.”

when Culture people didn’t speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that other language, they lost the carefully balanced interpretative structure of the Culture language, left its subtle shifts of cadence, tone and rhythm

Marain was a synthetic language, designed to be phonetically and philosophically as expressive as the pan-human speech apparatus and the pan-human brain would allow.

Eächic was an ordinary, evolved language, with rooted assumptions which substituted sentimentality for compassion and aggression for cooperation. A comparatively innocent and sensitive soul like Gurgeh was bound to pick up some of its underlying ethical framework if he spoke it all the time.

nothing was more guaranteed to cause you problems on an Azad board than trying to play in a way you didn’t really believe in.

My respect for those great Minds which use the likes of you and me like game-pieces increases all the time. Those are very smart machines.”