The Player of Games

I don’t write much these days (other than book lists and interviews!). But this blog is where I park things that matter to me, so I carved out a little time to write about one of my favorite novels.

Back in my early New York years—now more than thirty years gone—I discovered Iain M. Banks’ Culture books. As I’ve written before, I reread them every few years, and the one I always return to is The Player of Games.

What you get out of a book is in part a reflection of who you are and where you are at that moment. I find something new every time I read Player. Although the book was published nearly 40 years ago, it feels fresh and relevant today.

Iain M. Banks

Banks (1954-2013) grew up in Fife, Scotland, studied English and Philosophy at Stirling, and published The Wasp Factory in 1984 under the pen name “Iain Banks.” A year later, he added the middle initial for his science fiction work and launched the Culture series with Consider Phlebas (1987). For the rest of his life, he alternated between publishing a mainstream novel and a science fiction novel.

Across all of his work, he wrote about technology, class, and ethics with the same energy. His political convictions are expressed clearly in his interviews, and some of those beliefs are reflected in the Culture novels. The Culture is a cash-free, AI-run, galaxy-spanning civilization that occasionally tries, out of what seems suspiciously like boredom, to nudge less-fortunate societies forward.

If you read Banks’ interviews from the nineties and the oughts, what is clear is how much joy he derived from writing the Culture novels. For him, this was enormous fun. It provided places to blow up things, experiment with (galactic) ideas, and generally have a riotous time.

The Player of Games

Published in 1988, The Player of Games is one of the easier entry points into the Culture, among the nine novels. The setup is this: Jernau Morat Gurgeh, the Culture’s greatest game player — “game” here in the sense of board games, as opposed to a physical sport — grows bored in paradise. A covert arm of the Culture, called Special Circumstances, offers him a cure: travel to the Empire of Azad and compete in its great societal game.

Banks wrote Player right after Consider Phlebas, a sprawling war novel. He wanted something tighter. A lifelong board game obsessive, he began with this stipulation: What if an entire society revolved around a single, monstrously complex game? Dropping Gurgeh into Azad allows Banks to then run two experiments simultaneously: (1) How does a soft utopian react to a hyper-virile hierarchy? (2) What does the Culture look like when it isn’t at war, just quietly meddling?

Azad’s tournament is half chess and half psychological stress test. Every move reveals a slice of the player’s politics; every round filters citizens up or down the societal ladder. The contest decides everything from tax brackets to who gets to be emperor. Win and you rule; lose and you might be mutilated.

On the surface, Player is a sports story with spaceships and a flawed hero. Underneath — and not very far below — is a study of how economic, cultural, and algorithmic rules shape the people who live within them.

Yet Banks never lets the philosophy smother the fun. We still get vast orbital habitats, FTL ships, drones with (a lot of) personality, and—beneath all this pageantry—the steel of Special Circumstances rigging events “for the greater good.” You can, and I have, read this novel purely for the thrill of the story.

Meaning

But if you feel like looking, there are things to grapple with.

Gurgeh’s restlessness shows how even abundance can feel empty when risk disappears. Banks isn’t cheering for Azad—its prisons and torture chambers settle that—but he does suggest that challenge matters. The Culture has eradicated human misery, suffering, and physical needs, but meaning still arises from effort, stakes, and choice. He is arguing that we need mountains to climb.

The novel also highlights intervention. The Culture believes that sabotaging Azad’s regime is moral, and it accomplishes this by nudging Gurgeh like a chess piece. Can a powerful society mend a broken one without becoming manipulative itself?

The Culture and Azad are clearly set in philosophical contrast to one another. The Culture offers comfort and freedom, while Azad relies on hierarchy and fear. The Culture intervenes, whereas Azad obliterates. Azad has a winner-takes-all ladder; the Culture is ostentatiously egalitarian (though the Minds run the place, if you look closely).

The Culture itself along with Azad’s totalizing game give the reader our world seen through a glass darkly: algorithms rate our credit and curate our feeds, drones and data echo Special Circumstances, debates on UBI and AI mirror the Culture’s post-work life, and a winner-takes-all ladder still dresses raw power as fairness—there’s more, but you should read and interpret for yourself.

And remember, he wrote this 40 years ago, before the appearance of virtually all of our current technologies, including the Internet itself in its current form.

Memory

After work, in midtown Manhattan in the pre-Kindle days, I would sometimes walk to Coliseum Books at 57th and Broadway to see if a new Culture novel had arrived. Coliseum and all the other bookstores that shaped my reading life are now gone. So there is admittedly some wallowing in nostalgia when I re-read a Culture novel — store lights reflecting on wet pavement, winter slush around my shoes.

But great books, indeed all great works of art, possess enduring meaning derived from timeless stories and allegories. Here is the story of The Player of Games: In a world of algorithms, sentient drones, and automation, the real game is deciding who writes the rules.

And a PS:

As I've written elsewhere, science-fiction writers deserve more credit for world-building, among other things. Like Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, only “backwards and in high heels,” they must match the Austens and Naipauls on craft while inventing whole universes. We are fortunate to have Banks’ sketches of Culture ships, habitats, weapons, and language. The depth of imagination is astonishing.