Read All The Books Aaaaaah! discussion
This topic is about
The Player of Games
Joy 2022
>
The Player of Games
date
newest »
newest »
message 1:
by
The Joy of Erudition
(new)
-
rated it 3 stars
Jul 30, 2022 09:19AM
This will be my first book in the Culture series. It's actually the second book in the series, but Moid says they can be read in any order, and that this one is better than the first.
reply
|
flag
So far this is about a guy named Gurgeh, not related to the character in The Black Cauldron, who's a renowned master gamer of all kinds, and in general seems very bored and disaffected because no one poses him a challenge.Not a master of all kinds, actually, because the first we see of him is getting his arse handed to him in some kind of VR shooter game, and excusing his poor performance by complaining that it's a child's game, not worthy of his skills.
“You’re so destructive, Gurgeh,” Boruelal told him. “Why not help us instead? Become part of the faculty instead of an itinerant guest lecturer?”
“I’ve told you, Professor; I’m too busy. I have more than enough games to play, papers to write, letters to answer, guest trips to make… and besides… I’d get bored. I bore easily, you know,” Gurgeh said, and looked away.
Yes indeed, I did get that impression of you, Gurgeh.
Bored, boring Gurgeh moans and whines to his patient friend about how bored and dissatisfied with his life he is.“Everything seems… gray at the moment, Chamlis. Sometimes I start to think I’m repeating myself, that even new games are just old ones in disguise, and that nothing’s worth playing for anyway.”
And later:
“This is not a heroic age,” he told the drone, staring at the fire. “The individual is obsolete. That’s why life is so comfortable for us all. We don’t matter, so we’re safe. No one person can have any real effect anymore.”
Okay, we get it. He's bored because he's sitting around waiting for his Call To Adventure.
An extremely temperamental drone named Mawhrin-Skel comes to Gurgeh during a break from a big tournament match. He's playing against a worthy opponent who was trying for a clean sweep victory, but he rallied to the point where he has a good chance to claim that same clean sweep victory, which would be a first for a non-native non-exhibition match. Mawhrin-Skel offers to use his special-ops scanners to discover Gurgeh's opponent's hidden pieces and give Gurgeh the information, so he can cheat his way to victory.This was a long conversation, and through the whole thing I really couldn't see why it was taking so long. Why would he be tempted at all? He's been lamenting not having any worthy opponents or true challenges, and now that he has one, he would consider throwing it away and taking a meaningless, unearned victory? How can you bask in praise that you know you didn't earn and don't deserve? Why strive for achievements at all if you're willing to undermine the entire legitimacy of achieving something?
And he accepts the drone's offer, and he cheats. So I don't understand this character at all. I didn't like him before, but at least he never even considered cheating before. Before, his "what's the point?" mentality was that the games weren't meaningful enough, and that he couldn't be heroic. But with cheating, whatever meaning the struggle had before is entirely gone.
The author both has to explain what smartphones are (called "terminals" in this setting), and explain how stories that include smartphones have to contrive some way to make them unavailable in order to create tension. This was published in 1988, so it was pretty accurately forward-thinking.Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another. A terminal, in the shape of a ring, button, bracelet or pen or whatever, was your link with everybody and everything else in the Culture. With a terminal, you were never more than a question or a shout away from almost anything you wanted to know, or almost any help you could possibly need.
I'm not too happy about the fact that Gurgeh is now on a 6-year excursion far away from all of the characters that I liked better than him. I hope I'll like some of the new characters.
It's not bad, really, aside from my lack of interest in the main character, but it's not really grabbing me as one of the top 4 or 5 SF series of this particular flavour. There's the Expanse, the Commonwealth Saga, The Culture, and the Revelation Space series, and maybe another one I'm forgetting. This is the first I've read of any of those.There are, of course, other SF series that are just as big, but of a somewhat different flavour.
By this point, 62% in, I think I can conclude that the imaginative game landscapes and mysterious and exotic alien culture I was expecting from this book was just me expecting too much. The aliens, despite having three sexes, are so much like modern humans that they might as well be, aside from a taste for Ancient Rome-style entertainments (like gladiators killing each other for the entertainment of the crowd). There's a sensationalistic press that's just as likely to turn on you if you don't give them what they want, attention-seekers, secret service assassins, military types complete with interdepartmental rivalries, etc.And the game itself is left abstract. The reader is never told the rules or the objective, just general strategies that Gurgeh is taking, and occasional mentions of specific moves that mean nothing to me. That's all fine, actually, because even if I did know the rules, there's no guarantee I could follow what was going on. I know how to play chess, but if I read a story about a chess tournament that went deep into strategies and specific moves, I'd probably just skim over it, so Banks is probably doing me a favour by leaving it vague and just reporting whether they're winning or losing.
That said, I thought the game was going to be interesting in some way, like it would have some interesting locations or visuals or interactions. But it's portrayed as just a big board game.
Now his drone is taking Gurgeh to the poor parts of the empire, a little tour to show him the hardships of the poor and lower class, and I guess to give him a reason to see this whole thing through. I don't know what good he'll be able to do, though. They've made it clear repeatedly that his participation in the game is strictly honourary, and he won't actually be entitled to any political gains if he wins.I'll bet there'll be some loophole that lets him actually take control anyway, though.
Gurgeh's drone, Flere-Imsaho, basically acted as a cross between the Ghost of Christmas Present (especially the part where the ghost shows Scrooge the children called 'Ignorance' and 'Want') and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, showing him worse and worse misery and suffering.He was standing in a small garden, dark and dusty and deserted, at the back of the hospital, hemmed in on all sides. Yellow light from grimy windows spilled onto the gray grass and cracked paving-stones. The drone said it still had things it wanted to show him. It wanted him to see a place where down-and-outs slept; it thought it could get him into a prison as a visitor—
“I want to go back; now!” he shouted, throwing back the hood.
See Scrooge:
“Spirit!” said Scrooge, “show me no more! Conduct me home. Why do you delight to torture me?”
“One shadow more!” exclaimed the Ghost.
“No more!” cried Scrooge. “No more. I don’t wish to see it. Show me no more!”
But then it turns out Flere-Imsaho was only "easing him in" to the real horrors of this society, and shows him the hidden Level 2 and Level 3 "entertainments" reserved for the most powerful, highest-status people, and suddenly we have a major tonal shift for this book. This civilisation is essentially the worst dystopia you can imagine. And yet there's still no actual indication that Gurgeh will ever be in a position to do anything about it, so at the moment it's just filling him with impotent frustration and horror.
Again, echoes of Scrooge:
“Why show me this, if I am past all hope?”
Usually this book is written from the PoV of Gurgeh. Just occasional sections from someone else's perspective. Usually, his thought processes are transparent to the reader, and so his motivations and actions should generally be expected. But the author keeps writing Gurgeh taking actions that seem very much out of character as it's been established, and leaving his motivations for those actions opaque. Or failing to react to something that should have been important to him, given what was previously established, again without explanation. It's not all the time, as it is for some other authors who clearly don't care about the character aspects of their work, but when it happens here, I notice.
I may be jumping the gun a little bit, but I'm 80% finished by now, so even if the ending is amazing, it's not going to change my opinion that much. I went with recommendations to decide which Culture book to start with, and two lists put this one at #1, and another put it at #2, so they really think this is a great representation of the Culture series. If that's the case, then this series probably isn't quite for me. I'll still try another book or two in the series, but most likely after I've tried some other series.
There was a bit that confused me here. It may have been an intentional obfuscation by the author, or it may have just been me not catching on to something until it had been going on for a while. Gurgeh was saddened by the realisation that this game had reached a point where the outcome was inevitable, and nothing more could be done to make it go on any longer. Okay, he's losing, fine, and when he starts scanning the board desperately looking for some way it might be prolonged, I expected maybe he'd see a possibility he'd overlooked, and make a comeback. (view spoiler)If it was intentional, I would have expected the reversal to be heralded as a big revelation by the time it was made obvious, but there was none of that. It just went on as if he'd been talking plainly the whole time.
Earlier I said I was disappointed about the location being bland. Well, Banks fixed that when the final game took place on a planet with only a single strip of land around the equator, and a never-ending wildfire that burns steadily around the world, with the flora and fauna adapted to survive annual burning.The ending was very good. By which I mean the part where we're reunited with the characters I liked at the beginning who were left behind for the bulk of the book. Before that, there was a little speech revealing the master plan that had been going on underneath everything, which was fun in a way, but it was very impersonal. The master plan was orchestrated by faceless, offscreen entities, and only explained through one of their agents who was just as much a pawn as Gurgeh. Getting a taste of the good characters again right at the end just made me wish the whole book had been about them instead of what I got.
I'll give it 3 stars.
★★★☆☆
that equator land sounds cool tho not a world i wanna live in
Yeah, maybe interesting to visit as long as you don't get caught up in the fire. I'll stick to cooler climes if I'm going to travel, though.
