VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM (4)
By:
July 13, 2024
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
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THE PLAYER OF GAMES | IAIN M. BANKS | 1988
There’s a crucial scene in The Player of Games in which Jernau Morat Gurgeh — who has come to Eä, home planet of the Empire of Azad, to play a gigantically complex high-stakes board game also called Azad — takes a walk through a city at night. Gurgeh is a famous game player in the galaxy-spanning society known as The Culture, about which Iain Banks wrote several curious and inspired books. The Culture is a sort of utopian space-opera bonobo Scandinavia: there are, like, no rules, everybody does what they want, there’s plenty of everything to go around, humans and sentient machines cooperate, people are always switching sexes and getting intensely into volcano design or attentive lovemaking. Gurgeh has been recruited by The Culture’s diplomats, who regard the Empire of Azad as a primitive menace, to go there and play in the Azad tournament that determines who gets to be emperor. Azadians take their game very seriously; it’s the key to their society.
In his walk through the Azadian city at night, Gurgeh sees cruelty, inequality, pathological dominance: the strong despoiling and savaging the weak; maimed and abject people selling themselves, begging, suffering. There are three increasingly more elite layers of visual entertainment, roughly corresponding to broadcast TV, cable, and premium cable: regular pornography, violent humiliation-themed pornography, and unspeakable state-produced torture and slaughter. Gurgeh, puzzled and appalled in the way Europeans are puzzled and appalled by American culture, gains a new appreciation of what’s at stake in the Azad tournament. With insight and resolve refreshed, he gets down to the business of kicking one ass after another until he’s kicked them all, including the emperor’s.
But The Player of Games is not about winning; it’s about playing to understand. Yes, the forward-pressing impulse of trying to play effectively does impart a pleasing quality of tautness to your experience of a game, and trying to win is one reason to play effectively, but there are better reasons: cooperating with others, doing something well for the sake of doing it well, denying triumph to competition-worshipping monsters. And the sideways movement of simply being in the world of the game — navigating its landscape and seasons, negotiating its processes and routines and scenes, feeling the pull of its gravity and the push of its prevailing winds — imparts depth and texture to life by creating additional states of existence offering knowledge and perspective. Whether you’re playing Azad or pickup basketball or Settlers of Catan, moving and thinking in the game world is the truest reason to play games. Trying to play well makes that movement more satisfying, and winning is just a side effect of trying to play well.
Playing virtuosically to deepen his understanding of the game, his Vince Lombardi-ite alien opponents, and his own mind, Gurgeh defeats victory itself — a wise reminder that winning is overrated, both in the Empire of Azad and on our own barbarous planet.
VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on SNOW CRASH | Mandy Keifetz on THE GENOCIDAL HEALER | Matthew De Abaitua on SWAMP THING | Carlo Rotella on THE PLAYER OF GAMES | Lynn Peril on GEEK LOVE | Stephanie Burt on THE CARPATHIANS | Josh Glenn on DAL TOKYO | Deb Chachra on THE HYPERION CANTOS | Adam McGovern on KID ETERNITY | Nikhil Singh on THE RIDDLING REAVER | Judith Zissman on RANDOM ACTS OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE | Ramona Lyons on PARABLE OF THE SOWER | Jessamyn West on the MARS TRILOGY | Flourish Klink on DOOMSDAY BOOK | Matthew Battles on THE INTEGRAL TREES | Tom Nealon on CLAY’S ARK | Sara Ryan on SARAH CANARY | Gordon Dahlquist on CONSIDER PHLEBAS | Alex Brook Lynn on VURT | Miranda Mellis on STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND | Nicholas Rombes on RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH | Adelina Vaca on NEUROMANCER | Marc Weidenbaum on AMERICAN FLAGG! | Peggy Nelson on VIRTUAL LIGHT | Michael Grasso on WILD PALMS.
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