Review:
The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks
| Series: |
Culture #2 |
| Publisher: |
HarperPrism |
| Copyright: |
1989 |
| Printing: |
February 1987 |
| ISBN: |
0-06-105356-2 |
| Format: |
Trade paperback |
| Pages: |
295 |
The Player of Games is political space opera and the second book in
the shared Culture setting. As with most Culture books, the reading order
is not particularly important. It won the 1989 Locus Award for best
science fiction novel and sometimes competes with
Use of Weapons as the consensus best
Culture novel.
This review is a re-read and yet another experiment in how to re-review a
book. This time, I decided to write a full second review with substantial
spoilers so that I can talk in more detail about the book. If you want to
avoid spoilers, or just want to see how my thoughts have evolved from my
first reading, see
my original review from
2005.
Gurgeh plays games. He is probably the best strategy game player in the
entirety of the galaxy-spanning Culture. He has written papers on game
theory, won innumerable major championships, and is a celebrity in the
circle of like-minded aficionados.
Gurgeh is also bored and in the middle of the Culture equivalent of a
mid-life crisis. As the story opens, he's vaguely unsatisfied and adrift,
unenthused by his normal activities, and searching vaguely for something
that will break through his ennui. He is caught by surprise by the thrill
he gets from a moment's misunderstanding in which an opponent suspects him
of cheating, which sets him up to be (apparently) clumsily blackmailed by
a deeply unpleasant drone named Mawhrin-Skel.
SPOILERS BELOW. If you have not read this book, consider stopping
here and instead reading my original
no spoiler
review.
The first hundred pages of
The Player of Games is a slow, somewhat
plodding introduction to Gurgeh, his social circle, and life in (one part
of) the Culture. I remember being fascinated by this part the first time I
read this book. It was only the second Culture novel I read and the first
set in the Culture proper, so the world-building underlying this odd
post-scarcity utopia on a vast intelligent habitat with sentient drones,
complex privacy rules, endless cocktail parties, and apparently
directionless socialites was intriguingly unlike the other science fiction
I was reading at the time. This time through, I have to admit I was less
impressed.
Gurgeh is not very likable, and his desultory mid-life crisis is a little
boring. None of his friends have enough depth to appear as more than side
notes, in part because Gurgeh doesn't seem to care enough about any of
them to make them interesting to the reader. I've since read seven other
Culture novels, so Banks's cocktail parties hold less charm and I was
impatient for the real action to begin.
These chapters are still important, though, because they establish how
utterly average Gurgeh is. He has one unique talent, a deep affinity with
and obsession with strategy games, and is otherwise a bit of a depressed
narcissist with a few casual relationships, a friend that he barely
confides in, and a comfortable and familiar life. He is not in any way a
hero or a charismatic figure; he just happens to be exceptionally good at
one thing, enough to make him famous among people who care about that one
thing and probably unknown to anyone else apart from the occasional idly
perused news headline. He is the Culture's equivalent of the world chess
champion.
The Contact division of the Culture has a problem. The Empire of Azad in
the Lesser Magellanic Cloud is a nasty, expansionist culture of the sort
that Contact would like to deal with before it causes broader problems.
The Culture's normal approaches are thwarted by an unusual organizing
principle: The empire is built around and takes its name from the game of
Azad, a highly complex strategy game developed over thousands of years.
Azad is the civil service exams, means of political and religious dispute
resolution, selection mechanism for the emperor, and civic religion. Faced
with that oddity, Contact turned to Special Circumstances, the Culture's
more aggressive and less restrained way of dealing with tricky problems.
Special Circumstances, in turn, needs someone who can learn how to play
the game of Azad. They want Gurgeh to take a very long trip.
For all of Gurgeh's dissatisfaction, he's not impulsive enough to take a
five year journey away from his life and everyone he knows just to play a
novel game. Conveniently, Mawhrin-Skel's blackmail resolves this
reluctance.
The game of Azad requires some suspension of disbelief. Banks provides a
few glimpses at the mechanics of the game, but those details are
insufficient to reconstruct the rules, and some of the claims made about
its properties are improbable at best. The best mental model I could build
for it is a strategy or simulation game built around units and territory
control, with supplemental side games used to build up resources for the
main boards, but it's more of a plot device and a set piece than a
world-building invention. The significance of Azad the game is its role in
society: The Empire of Azad believes they have constructed a game whose
complexity so closely models reality that the skills required for success
in the game are precisely the skills required for success in the empire.
The Empire of Azad is wrong, and this is one of the core themes of
The Player of Games. As with many Culture novels, what Special
Circumstances tells Gurgeh is, at best, incomplete. Gurgeh is a refutation
of the basis of belief in Azad; this is why it is important thematically
that he is an average, somewhat unlikable citizen of the Culture whose
only special characteristic is skill at learning and playing games.
Azad is the myth of meritocracy given physical form as a game. It provides
the anchor of the empire for the same reason that societies on Earth place
enormous weight on standardized tests, capitalist success, or public
debates. All societies face the problem of selecting good leaders and
testing opposing beliefs, and all societies attempt to find some form of
shortcut, some set of general principles, tests, or objective metrics used
to select the best person via a process that people consider plausible and
fair. The game of Azad is a paragon of apparently meritocratic process. No
matter who you are or what your background is, if you excel at the game
that, in theory, objectively tests your skills, you are given a position
of power.
In practice, the Empire of Azad is not that naive. Manipulation outside of
the game happens, only some players have the opportunity and resources to
spend years learning the game at a deep level, and only their dominant sex
truly stands a chance in games that matter. But neither is Azad's place in
society a fiction. There is corruption around the edges, and a lot of
people are filtered out before the games begin, but the highest echelons
of society are true believers. The game does decide both rank and policy;
Banks is arguing against a strong form of apparently working meritocracy.
Gurgeh represents a refutation of this meritocracy through the mechanism
that breaks every supposed meritocracy: The map is not and cannot be the
territory. Any objective evaluation criteria is necessarily separate from
what it is trying to measure, and in that separation there is always an
opportunity. Gurgeh has none of the background, training, or mindset
expected for a player of Azad because he could not possibly care less
about any of the things Azad represents to the Empire. What he has instead
is a preternatural skill at games and vast experience with the most
intricate strategy games the Culture, a much larger society, has been able
to devise. He also has both the patience and the resources to devote
himself entirely to learning a game for several years, and past experience
in doing that with other games.
If Azad represents the civil service exams, Gurgeh is the person who has
no interest in ruling but adores memorizing facts and taking tests. The
theory behind the exams is that the skills to pass the exam only come with
the correct mindset to do the job for which the exam is testing. Gurgeh is
an existence proof that this is not always the case.
Banks also uses Azad to show another aspect of the failure of meritocracy:
A society whose rulers are chosen through a competition takes on the shape
of that competition. The Empire of Azad is run by the winners of
competitive games, so the empire is a winner-take-all system of dominance
and status hierarchy. Here, I think Banks lays the point on a little
thick; the empire is an irredeemable hellhole of misogyny, sexual abuse,
slavery, genocide, and military colonialism to a degree that is a bit hard
to justify solely from the game. There is a beautiful turning point about
two-thirds of the way through the book where Gurgeh's face is shoved into
just how vile Azad society is and reconsiders his approach to the
tournament as a result, and I think it may have been a bit stronger if the
morality had been a little less blatant and absolute.
To the extent that Gurgeh has political beliefs, he represents a Culture
flavor of soft liberalism. He has opinions about acceptable and
unacceptable ways to treat people, but he grew up in a utopia and his
opinions are mostly theoretical. When he sees just how vile people can be
outside of that utopia, he is revolted and appalled and redoubles his
efforts to fight that society in the only way he knows how, inside of a
game. This part of the book follows the standard, if enjoyable, plot of a
flawed but fundamentally decent person discovering a true injustice and
becoming enraged at it.
In a lot of books, that would have been where the plot stops. Banks is
doing something more subtle and more interesting, though. Gurgeh wipes the
board with his next challenger, but that soft liberalism eventually proves
inadequate. To learn the game of Azad and to play in the tournament,
Gurgeh has been wrapping himself in Azad culture and its language, and in
that frame of mind he is losing the climactic game of the book. It's only
when he is pushed to think in Marain, the native language of the Culture,
that he understands what is happening in the game and how to defeat
Nicosar, the emperor.
This, on the surface, is a bit too close to the
strong
hypothesis of linguistic relativity to be entirely plausible, but such an
objection would miss the point that Banks is making here. Marain is a
construct, the product of considerable effort within the Culture to match
language to the most nuance and complexity that brains can understand, and
it is a language, one of the most social and collective artifacts a
society can produce. Gurgeh is a remarkable individual with an impressive
talent, but individual skill and achievement can only take him so far. The
critical final piece is the support of societal infrastructure
intentionally built and maintained to help him make better decisions.
Once I noticed that point, I saw it everywhere in the book. The empire
repeatedly attempts to subvert or distract Gurgeh with drugs, pleasure,
politics, or danger, and at each point there is some critical piece of
Culture social infrastructure that blunts the attack. Illicit substances
and forbidden vices are less tempting to someone for whom the illicit has
been demystified by the Culture's gentler approach to rules and
boundaries. Embedded biological mechanisms allow him to divert drugs so
that they don't affect him. At first, it's easy to read this as an
exercise of self-control, but on this re-read I saw how much
behind-the-scenes infrastructure supports Gurgeh's ability to ignore
temptation.
This social support notably does not take the form of some ideological
principle or moral framework. Gurgeh is not a monk or an ascetic, as is
obvious from the first third of the book, and he has no political ideology
to speak of. He is a flawed person with a streak of danger-seeking and
self-aggrandizement, which the Culture exploited to get him involved in
Azad. But through a lot of hard work, technological and social, the
Culture has given him a robust foundation and a set of mental and
biological tools that make him remarkably hard to corrupt. The implication
is that if Gurgeh has that support, so does every other member of the
Culture. It's neither a religion or an ideology; it's well-maintained
infrastructure, complex and nuanced and pragmatic, and composed of
innumerable small solutions to specific problems.
I think the true climax of this book takes place the night before the
final day of the game, in the tower meeting between Gurgeh and Nicosar.
Gurgeh has realized that he's already won; there's nothing Nicosar can do
to salvage the game. He's also seen that the game represents a cultural
conflict and conversation between the Culture and Azad and he's
overwhelmed by the beauty of that communication and sadness that the game
is about to be over. Gurgeh's true passion is the game. It is doubtless
easier for him to be magnanimous because he's winning, but he also loves
the structure of the game itself and what two players can create in a sort
of collaborative competition.
Gurgeh tries to express all of this to Nicosar. It is one of the most
centrist liberal moments I've ever read in a novel, the pure essence of
"reaching across the aisle" or "disagreeing agreeably." Gurgeh has seen
something beautiful, something he's created with Nicosar, a moment of true
communication, and he wants to share it. Surely Nicosar sees the same
thing; surely now that he sees Gurgeh has won, he can appreciate the board
structure, savor the moment, understand the transient beauty of a game
that is about to end and how perfectly it captures the meeting of their
different cultures. That moment does Gurgeh real credit. It's a rare sign
of emotional and spiritual depth in a character who often seems
superficial.
Nicosar meets this outreach with unhinged, furious contempt. He despises
everything Gurgeh represents, everything the Culture is, and the next day
he tries to kill Gurgeh on the board of the game.
It is a devastating critique of liberal tolerance, all the more so because
Gurgeh's attitude and outreach is truly admirable. It is perhaps the most
sympathetic moment that Gurgeh has in the entire book, the moment where
the reader thinks "oh, I get it, I understand what he really cares about."
Gurgeh assumes that Nicosar is not his position or culture, that they have
made a moment of connection that transcends all the awful things he
previously learned about the empire of Azad. That Nicosar, despite being
the emperor of the society that is currently doing so many things Gurgeh
finds repulsive, cannot be as bad as his society. And Nicosar considers
that outreach to be weak, disgusting, and vile, and does everything that
he can to destroy it.
One of the oddest twists of our current moment is the obsession that some
billionaires have with stories that are moral arguments against exactly
what those billionaires are currently doing. The most obvious example is
Peter Thiel, who is obsessed with
The Lord of the Rings and has
devoted his life to becoming Saruman, a character who is notably not one
of the protagonists. It's as if something in them recognizes the power of
the story, but some deep shame or narcissism or simple aversion allows
them to completely ignore what the story means.
Elon Musk is obsessed with the Culture novels. He names the SpaceX rockets
following Culture Ship naming conventions and has claimed that one of his
goals is to bring about a Culture-style utopia. And in 1989, years before
anyone had ever heard of him, Banks cast him as the villain of
The
Player of Games. There is so much of Nicosar in Musk: the superficial
charm, the limited brilliance (Nicosar is a very good Azad player), the
ambition, the pride, and the vicious, spitting contempt for everything the
Culture represents at every level deeper than superficial materialism. And
Banks is as clear about his opinion of Nicosar as he is about anything in
any Culture novel.
One of the oldest fictional answers to what a society does with people
like Nicosar is the consequences of hubris. By being unable to accept
defeat, by holding a vision of the world so tightly, they become brittle
and unstable and bring about their own collapse. In a broad sense, that is
what happens in
The Player of Games with a bit of pushing from
Special Circumstances. By the politics of the game, Nicosar had already
won; the results of Gurgeh's earlier games had already been faked, the
final game had no political consequences, and everyone who knew its true
outcome could be disposed of. Gurgeh's win could have been covered up and
ignored. But Nicosar could not endure the thought that he would be beaten
by someone like Gurgeh, playing Azad the way that Gurgeh was playing it.
Gurgeh had to be destroyed on the board of the game; Nicosar's pride did
not allow any other outcome, even if it meant Nicosar's death.
However, Special Circumstances didn't let hubris be the end of the story.
In the climax of the book, the drone protecting Gurgeh also makes sure
that Nicosar dies. There is a fig leaf of plausible deniability, but it's
so obvious that even the unobservant Gurgeh sees through it immediately.
It's hard to escape the feeling that was Banks's answer to what to do with
people like Nicosar: They cannot live within society, because they will
not live peacefully within society.
I enjoyed
The Player of Games as much this time through as I did
the first time, but for entirely different reasons. In my first read, I
focused on the world-building of the Culture, the political machinations,
and the concept of games as conversations between the players. This time,
I was struck by the political commentary just below the surface. Special
Circumstances wanted to resolve the problem of the Empire of Azad without
a military conflict and occupation that would be long, brutal, expensive,
and demoralizing. They found an answer that relied on the diversity of the
Culture. A vast, utopian civilization in which people can pursue whatever
interests make them happy produces innumerable microspecialized oddities,
people with astonishing talents in some small field that only a tiny
fraction of people care about. It produces, in other words, innumerable
keys for locks that you may never encounter, but which are invaluable if
you happen to stumble across that lock.
Gurgeh is not a hero. He is not a paragon of moral virtue, or even a
charming charismatic, He is an entirely average member of an extraordinary
society, the beneficiary of thousands of years of concerted effort at
producing a robust, flexible foundation on which to raise robust, flexible
citizens with a shared sense of basic morality. Those people, by
themselves, do not solve all of life's problems; the structure of Special
Circumstances and its willingness to bend rules in order to maintain them
is the tension and
deus ex machina in all of the Culture novels.
But much of the strength of Special Circumstances is that it has an entire
civilization of people like Gurgeh to draw upon when it needs them.
It has those people because the Culture comprehensively rejects
competitive meritocracy, something that some readers of the Culture novels
appear incapable of comprehending.
Rating: 9 out of 10
The RISC-V CPU architecture has been gaining a lot of popularity since it launched in 2014, and now that the industry is standardizing on the RVA23 level that includes vector support as a mandatory extension, we are likely to see a lot more edge- and IoT devices with the ability to run local LLMs at reasonable speed, and most importantly at very compelling prices.
Being persistent, sticking to a plan and showing up to work every day is generally valued highly across all cultures as virtuous behavior. It is obvious that anything of value and worth achieving is also not easy, but requires significant and recurring effort. Learning a new language, winning a sports competition or building a successful business are all typical scenarios where grit plays a central role above everything else. However, sometimes the virtue of tenacity can result in just a waste of energy.
The question is then: how does one recognize that true progress is being blocked by stubbornness and a pivot would be the correct decision, as opposed to being close to breakthrough where doing more of the same would actually be the right choice?
This is an amazing feature. Thanks to everyone involved in making it
happen!
