The Player of Games, by Iain M Banks
4.0 Stars
8-4-2015

This was an inadvertent re-read, as I had purchased a copy for a friend and wanted to just refresh my memory of a few parts. Lol, we know how that turns out. I enjoyed the book on the second time around, though not nearly so much as the first. I found parts of the book to be more preachy and heavy-handed than the first time through. I was also more aware and bothered by a flaw that I mentioned last time, that the game Azad, which is the primary field of contention for most of the book, can never really be described. There are large parts of the book where there just isn't anyway for the author to have any detail in the writing, since the thing he is writing about is so nebulous. The McGuffin becomes the Albatross. Banks does better with the smaller games mentioned earlier in the book, since these he can actually outline and fill in some detail for. So, not a bad book, but I think it suffered a bit on re-read. Still very fun, snappy, and creative in many respects.

Edit, Historical note: There's a part of this book that I think back to, occasionally, when watching professional Starcraft 2 matches. One of the ideas of Starcraft's game design is that it asks the player to make many, many, many small choices. It exposes a lot of the guts and mechanical minutae of the game, where other games or other designs might abstract or automate these small nitty gritty details and decisions out. And yes, this makes Starcraft extraordinarily difficult to play, but it also widens the scope of player skill, allowing thousands and thousands of small, minute decisions to accrete into much larger effects that reflect a player's particular style, skill, and personality. Or to put it another way, the same units, the same composition, can behave very differently in the hands of one pro vs another pro, and certainly differently than in the hands of a lay person.
Anyway! Reproduced in full is the passage I think back to, which isn't an *exact* match to what Starcraft is doing, but is at least in the same neighborhood.

After thirty days, Gurgeh started to handle the pieces. A proportion of Azad game-pieces were biotechs: sculpted artefacts of genetically engineered cells which changed character from the moment they were first unwrapped and placed on the board; part vegetable, part animal, they indicated their values and abilities by colour, shape and size. The Limiting Factor claimed the pieces it had produced were indistinguishable from the real things, though Gurgeh thought this was probably a little optimistic.
It was only when he started to try to gauge the pieces, to feel and smell what they were and what they might become - weaker or more powerful, faster or slower, shorter or longer lived - that he realised just how hard the whole game was going to be. He simply could not work the biotechs out; they were just like lumps of carved, coloured vegetables, and they lay in his hands like dead things. He rubbed them until his hands stained, he sniffed them and stared at them, but once they were on the board they did quite unexpected things; changing to become cannon-fodder when he'd thought they were battleships, altering from the equivalent of philosophical premises stationed well back in his own territories to become observation pieces best suited for the high ground or a front line.
After four days he was in despair, and seriously thinking of demanding to be returned to Chiark, admitting everything to Contact and just hoping they would take pity on him and either keep Mawhrin-Skel on, or keep it silenced. Anything rather than go on with this demoralising, appallingly frustrating charade. The Limiting Factor suggested he forgot about the biotechs for the moment and concentrated on the subsidiary games, which, if he won them, would give him a degree of choice over the extent to which biotechs had to be used in the following stages. Gurgeh did as the ship suggested, and got on reasonably well, but he still felt depressed and pessimistic, and sometimes he would find that the Limiting Factor had been talking to him for some minutes while he had been thinking about some quite different aspect of the game, and he had to ask the ship to repeat itself. The days went by, and now and again the ship would suggest Gurgeh handled a biotech, and would advise him which secretions to build up beforehand. It even suggested he take some of the more important pieces into bed with him, so that he would lie asleep, hands clutched or arms cradled round a biotech, as though it was a tiny baby. He always felt rather foolish when he woke up, and he was glad there was nobody there to see him in the morning