The Player of Games

by Iain M. Banks

Paperback, 320 pages

English language

Published Aug. 10, 1989 by Orbit.

ISBN:: 978-1-85723-146-5

(19 reviews)

The Culture - a human/machine symbiotic society - has thrown up many great Game Players, and one of the greatest is Gurgeh. Jernau Morat Gurgeh. The Player of Games. Master of every board, computer, and strategy. Bored with success, Gurgeh travels to the Empire of Azad, cruel and incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game ... a game so complex, so like life itself, that the winner becomes emperor. Mocked, blackmailed, almost murdered, Gurgeh accepts the game, and with it the challenge of his life - a very possibly his death.

21 editions

Elias reviewed The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks (Culture, #2)

The Player of Games (Goodreads)

5 stars

Content warning General spoilers

Oh my god do I have thoughts about this book. But first, background about my rating: I try to abide by goodread's usage of the five star rating to avoid my reviews getting skewed toward more stars. So, this five star rating holds a little extra weight this time.

Alright, so. I love the culture. I was introduced through a reading I did for a Philosophy class nearly 3 years ago now, but only got around to reading the series of books now (this is the first culture book I've read). I love the absolute scale of it - it is difficult to get fully acquainted with it, and some parts of this book were confusing to me as a new initiate, but otherwise I think this book was a great introduction. There is so much to be explored, and I'm already a little disappointed that some of the parts I was most interested in from this book are not explored in future books (I skimmed some summaries). However, I am nearly unreasonably excited to learn more about the Minds.

Speaking of the minds, I love how drones are treated in this universe. As fully sentient with their own complex composition and depth of emotion - makes for far more interesting stories. I really enjoyed the twist of Mahwrin Skel being Flere-Imasaho. I caught on around the beginning of the third chapter, but the end reveal was still satisfactory.

The twists in this book were really enjoyable - I feel like its perfectly on brand for a large society to mostly keep its pawn in intersocietal chess in the dark so it was sorta awe inspiring to see just how much they kept in the dark. I really didn't expect for the final game to be played for the Empire of Azad's existence itself - I simply thought Nicosar had gone off the rails because he was a sore loser and could not stand to not win (despite his throne being assured, more or less).

Some additional notes: I really appreciated seeing Gurgeh sorta detach from reality after being shown the state media deciphered by Flere-Imasaho. I love how the way the story was told mirrored Gurgeh's detachment by referring to Gurgeh as a nondescript man that we no longer have a window into the thoughts of, especially. Of course this was, in the end, just Flere-Imasaho not making up what Gurgeh was thinking, but it really drives home that Gurgeh was having a mental breakdown of sorts trying to parse the absolute violence of the culture around him.

I'm just. Enamored. By the scale of the Culture and its society, how Gurgeh became consumed by the game and gave all of his focus to it, the drones, by Special Circumstances... It's all beautiful and fascinating and I'm excited to read the other books.

Jon Nixon reviewed The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks (Culture, part 2)

Review of 'The Player of Games' on 'Storygraph'

5 stars

This is the first Iain M Banks novel I've read and I really enjoyed it. It's big far future space opera, but the focus is on the characters (some of them AI drones). The pacing is great with peaceful sections interspersed with violence and threat building to a satisfying conclusion.

4thace reviewed The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks (Culture, #2)

Review of 'The Player of Games' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

The book is uncharacteristic of Banks's Culture novels, but in ways that mostly don't take away from one's enjoyment. The dialogue between the main character Gurgeh and intelligent drones Mawhrin-Skel, Chamlis, and Flere-Imsaho, is all more interesting and more illuminating than the dialogue with other humans of the Culture or with the Azadians, who are mostly characterized in broad strokes. The advanced minds of the Culture ships is mostly deep in the background, unlike some of the other books in this series by Banks, with only the slight exception of that of the Limiting Factor which is Gurgeh's ride to the distant Azadian planet. The game of Azad is only sketched out to suggest its vast complexity in the readers' minds, partly as a stand in for the confusion of society itself. For those who live in this realm, losing at Azad has consequences in one's standing in society, and the less dominant genders are mostly shut out from the game the same way their agency is minimized. Gurgeh mostly just breezes through the difficulties encountered playing Azad, so great is his mastery of game play. I never really came to believe he was in danger of assassination or bodily harm, and was really wondering whether the suggestion that a winner could become Emperor was going to be a factor for him. That didn't make him a perfectly admirable player or very laudable at all, just very well suited for the role the Culture had planned for him. A kind of inevitability of advancement undercut some of the tension in the story for me. There were revelations about the seamier sides of the barbaric Azadian culture which they were trying to hide from public view which I think set up the readers' doubts about the overall health of the Azad empire, foreshadowing the final reveal. There's effectively a ticking clock at the climax of the story, and by this point one is pretty sure that the outcome is going to go the way it does one way or another.

At the end, Gurgeh goes back home after years away and has a chance to reflect on what it all meant and where he goes from here. Again the conversations he has with the machine intelligence Chamlis becomes important, but in an amusing twist, we come to understand that he does not learn everything that came into play on his years-long adventure after all. I took this revelation about the Culture to be the main message of the book, not so much anything about what the viewpoint character was able to take away from the experience.

I listened to this as an audiobook which I think was a great plus. In the setup part of the novel I could see that a person could easily get bogged down waiting for a payoff, but having this narrated in an engaging fashion helped me stay on track. It also helped play up the comic aspects of the writing, which I had to admire.

Keith Stevenson reviewed The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks (Culture, #2)

Review of 'The Player of Games' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Even better than Consider Phlebas, Banks's vision for the Culture really takes off in Player of Games. It's a fantastic story that has many elements and phases all working together. It also extends Banks's interest in games - glimpsed in Phlebas - with his creation of the game of Azad and the revelation of what that gameplay really means. Next up: Use of Weapons.