{"id":3002,"date":"2013-07-12T18:57:41","date_gmt":"2013-07-12T22:57:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/?p=3002"},"modified":"2013-09-25T15:15:30","modified_gmt":"2013-09-25T19:15:30","slug":"the-player-of-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/the-player-of-games\/","title":{"rendered":"The Player of Games"},"content":{"rendered":"

{5\/5} “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.”<\/p>\n

Gurgeh is a famous game player — he plays a lot of games and almost always wins. During one game where he has a chance to do something no one’s ever done — if he cheats — he succumbs to temptation. He’s then blackmailed by a drone, an artificial intelligence who wants Gurgeh to use his influence to convince Special Circumstances to take him back.<\/p>\n

Special Circumstances would like Gurgeh to do something for them — they want him to travel to the Empire of Azad, a place no one has heard of, in order to play a game. The game is so important that the empire is named after it, Azad. Whoever wins the game becomes emperor.<\/p>\n

The Player of Games<\/strong> by Iain M. Banks was published in 1988. It’s second in his Culture<\/strong> series after Consider Phlebas<\/strong><\/a> but it’s not a sequel — it just takes place in the same universe.<\/p>\n

Gurgeh is a worthy character to base the book on. He has some help from a couple of machines — Flere-Imsaho, a drone, and Limiting Factor, his ship. Nicosar, the Emperor of Azad, provides some interest at the end of the book.<\/p>\n

If you like games, this is the book for you.<\/p>\n

It’s about the differences between cultures, and how things another culture does that you’ve never heard or thought about could be shocking.<\/p>\n

If you liked Consider Phlebas<\/strong> you’ll like this one (and vice versa) — it’s another great one.<\/p>\n

I’m going to read one more Banks novel immediately.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

{5\/5} “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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,28,5,8],"class_list":["post-3002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-book","tag-novels","tag-review","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3002"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3454,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3002\/revisions\/3454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}