I don’t really agree with your point. I think most games throughout the years have been good because they create narrative, at least between the players. One of my favorite aspects about the smash bros competitive scene is the “drama” and story narratives that it creates between players just based on results and tournament stories. I’ve found that most sports and older games will create these narratives as well, especially over the course of a tournament.
I don’t remember thinking that Banks somehow got it wrong or was outdated. That’s why the game itself was never explained and really superfluous to the story. The whole point of the book, in my opinion, was showing a competitive experience that grew to into becoming culture itself, which is an interesting sci fi idea.
@tomchick -
Banks doesn’t miss the point about how multiplayer games and aesthetic evolve, that’s just not central to this book. Throughout the series, we see examples of people playing multiplayer wargames, first-person-shooters, adventures, romances, and basically any variation on “play a game alone or with others in VR” you might care to think up. Some people just back up their consciousness and play insanely dangerous games in real life. If they die, it’s trivial in the setting to simply grow a new body and have your consciousness implanted into it.
Surface Detail is all about virtual-reality hell analogues: effectively, massively multiplayer games played by a digitized conscience.
So you might be able to say that The Player of Games got it all wrong, but it’s taking one book’s main character out of context of his setting.
Seems to me it’s entirely absent from this book! Which is the sum total of my exposure to Banks’, so I’m looking forward to reading some of the stuff where he writes about the roles that games have come to occupy since 1988.
Before his far-too-early and rather sudden death one of the things that Ian Banks did was snap in half the disc of his copy of Civilization (which version I don’t recall, II or III I guess) because it was getting in the way of his amazingly prolific writing career.
If @tomchick you’ve only read The Player of Games then just read all of them in chronological order. Won’t take that long. Consider Phlebas is very limited compared to Excession and the others that come after Excession. I loved Consider Phlebas when I read it for the first time. I reread it recently and despite the interesting ideas it’s rather action heavy and nothing like as funny or space operatic as the later writing.
Games with stories vs games with patterns. Well, where do I begin? : )
And yes he does some creepy ass scene in every book. I have no idea why it always seems petty minded and pointless to me. Its one of his flaws as a writer.
That’s his thing, he got his start as a paid writer with the Wasp Factory which was about a creepy like psychopath kid who murdered like three other kids before age 10.
Yeah whenever I get to those scenes I try and skip em. I dont have time to deal with whatever hang ups the dude had. Thats his problem. I just want a good SF yarn.
I think part of the themes of the culture is the contrast between the high mindedness of a post scarcity society and the sadism and suffering that is still there and is part of life.
Which is to say, the inclusion of those scenes is fundamental to making them great stories, IMO. Otherwise it would be too bland a setting.
Yes, it’s an interesting take on a whole society that defaults to leisure class. Even the human scientists, politicians, war-leaders, or superspies of the Culture only do what they do because they feel like they might like it. If they wanted to sit around all day, every day, and get high off whatever they’ve cooked up in their drug-factory glands, they could do that instead. (The protagonists of the Culture novels that don’t fit into those categories are usually manipulated into doing the bidding of cleverer minds, or find that revenge or guilt is a motivating factor.) I’m not quite sure what that makes the protagonist. If Gurgeh is the best pastime passer of time, the king of leisure activities, the savant of sloughing off, the Player of Games…does that make him the apex of what the Culture aspires to, or the most average guy out of all the average guys in the galaxy?
They’re playing a sort of multiplayer wargame at the very start of the book; Yay takes Gurgeh to play Super Laser Tag. He makes it clear it’s not to his taste:
‘It’s infantile, Yay. Why fritter your time away with this nonsense?’ …
‘I enjoy it,’ she said. ‘I enjoy the sort of games you like, but… I enjoy this too.’ She looked puzzled. ‘This is a game. Don’t you get any pleasure from this sort of thing?’
‘No. And neither will you, after a while.’
She shrugged easily. ‘Till then, then.’
Very late to this thread plus it’s been a while since I read POG but a couple of points (one I see has been picked up by the last commenter):
The book opens with an augmented reality multiplayer battle simulation game and it seems that otherwise strategic board games have a particular status within the Culture’s society (hence Gurgeh being for all intents and purposes a professional gameplayer). So saying Banks has somehow failed to anticipate that form of gaming seems unfair.
While pointing out the apparent dryness and lack of narrative structure to the games described in POG perhaps you are glossing over the fact that the whole story is about principle characters, and even the political future of an entire civilisation, getting played as if they are pieces on a board by the Culture; a deeply technocratic, ostensibly liberal society with profoundly sinister, imperialistic and manipulative tendencies.
It probably isn’t particularly insightful of me to point out that the titular “Player of Games” is in fact the one who gets played. Or maybe it is the Culture itself that is referred to by the title.
Responding to the original post, I think you may have missed some points. In the Player of Games book, the ultimate game that he ended up playing was a 3D game in the real world, on a large scale, where one has to move the game pieces around manually. It was a very complex game in strategy and resource allocation, closely approximating the interstellar empire in which it took place, and the winner would become the actual emperor.
The larger truth in this book is that the player himself, and the empire against whose people he played, were themselves pieces in a grander game played by sentient AI starships. Their goal was to beat that cruel empire at its own game to force it to be a good citizen in the galaxy-spanning collage of civilizations.
Hence, your perspective on the book is too narrow. The comment "What happened with games and what Banks didn’t anticipate is that the mechanics will take a back seat to storytelling. " does not appreciate the fact that this book is a very well-written and multilayered story, with much humor and vivid descriptions of the suffering and the mentality of the empire, and the intelligence and subtlety of the AI ships who gently and wisely guide along the Culture civilization. The game itself was just a prop.
Oh, and I just realized that the poster before me pretty much said the same thing in different words.
I read the entire book series. The machines were very careful, in their highly superhuman way, of what they were doing. And they saved the Culture when a non-machine civilization obsessed with converting the entire galaxy to their religion started an interstellar war.
Yet, machines made mistakes sometimes. If you want to read about a machine’s agony for what it did, during a terrible war, I highly recommend the book “Look to Windward”. It took many hundred years for that Mind to come to a decision regarding its mistake. The resolution came when the light from the explosion of the star it destroyed with all life around it finally reached the location where this machine was administering the entire system. Iain Banks has a way with words and ideas.
