The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

 

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

The night before last, I finished (re)reading The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, and I think I enjoyed it even more than the first time. I’m noticing quite a few things that I hadn’t picked up on 15 years ago. 

To begin with, the premise—though a bit stretched—really resonates with me. A man from the Culture—an all-around champion of strategy games—is recruited by the Culture’s secret service to travel to a rival system. There, the political structure (the "Empire") is governed through a massive strategy game, which is intended to separate the wheat from the chaff and serves as the basis for assigning government roles—all the way up to the supreme position: the Emperor.

The Empire, which holds the humanist values ​​of the Culture in contempt, allows our distinguished player, Gurgeh, to enter the multi-year tournament—convinced, in its arrogance, that an outsider could never succeed. It soon becomes clear that this won’t be the case.

As Gurgeh advances further into the tournament, he begins to perceive the symbolic links between this rival society and the game itself; it becomes increasingly evident that his success—or failure—will have major geopolitical consequences.

One particularly interesting aspect that I missed during my first read is that Banks seems to be describing—in a rather indirect way—our own modern capitalist society through the Empire: a society governed by money, which internalises cruelty as both an economic and a moral driving force. While the Empire is admittedly a bit cruder and more extreme, it’s not all that far off from our own reality. As for the Culture, it represents an idealised version of what our elites—at least those in democratic societies—claim to desire: a society of happiness, where everyone’s needs are met, and where each individual is free to be whoever they wish to be.

Consequently, Gurgeh’s perspective on the Empire is much like us—the readers—viewing our own society as the enemy, the system that must be brought down. And while this premise (assuming I haven’t just imagined it) might not be particularly surprising in 2026, it was far less common back in 1988.