The player of games by iain m banks5/22/2023 So begins a chain of events that sees Gurgeh working for Contact, the Culture’s diplomatic branch, on a mission to the empire of Azad.Īggressive, feudal, hierarchical, Azad is everything the Culture is not, and the empire draws both its power-structure and its name from the most complex game ever devised. Gurgeh’s malaise is interrupted by the arrival of a Drone, one of the Culture’s sentient machines, who persuades him to cheat for the first time in his life in an effort to achieve a perfect victory at the game of Stricken, something never before accomplished by a human player. He picks at the seams of the Culture’s supposed perfection in quiet ways asking whether the stakes are integral to the game and whether victory itself is enough. So while Gurgeh is a misfit he is a subtle one. Sheltered by the utopian Culture, the egalitarian, socialist, humanist society that underpins most of Banks’ science-fiction, Gurgeh begins to wonder if games can have meaning in a society where people want for nothing and consequently can win nothing. The game player has reached the apex of his profession and lives a privileged and hedonistic life on his own mountain range playing games, writing papers and attending parties.
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