The Player of Games is the second
Culture novel by
Iain M. Banks and the one that's generally considered the best introduction to the series
note Its predecessor, Consider Phlebas, is excellent, but doesn't so much as "introduce" you to The Culture as throw you at it. It tells the story of Jernau Morat Gurgeh, an expert game player, who is recruited/blackmailed by Special Circumstances into traveling to the Empire of Azad, a brutal regime where one's social rank is determined by playing the highly complex game of Azad.
The Player of Games provides examples of the following tropes:
- Absurdly High-Stakes Game:
- Your rank in Azad is also your rank in the Azad Empire; when the actual betting gets involved between players, the stakes can get downright scary. Scary like having your genitals removed if you lose (or both you and your opponent both having your genitals removed if the two of you try to cancel the bet or, heaven forbid, tie).
- Subverted for Gurgeh. As a guest of the Empire, he can't win any rank, and castration is meaningless since it'll just grow back. In fact, he seriously considers forfeiting to protect his opponent from a permanent castration. The final match with the Emperor is basically just an exhibition game - except that Flere-Imsaho has re-raised the stakes by telling the Emperor that if Gurgeh wins, the Culture is invading.
- Beware the Nice Ones: As always, the Culture's hat, and in this book, it's indicated by a scene at the end where Gurgeh realizes he plays like he's the Culture. As opposed to his opponent who plays like he's the Azadian Empire. While his Azadian opponent is consistently ruthless in his playing, Gurgeh's style involves a generally less aggressive attitude, but when he comes up against an opponent that's too smart to play him on his own terms, he has to play as the Culture Militant; geared up for war and ready to kick ass in the name of the greater good, with occasional bursts of ruthless sacrifice of his own pieces and relentlessly violent moves against his opponent. This is pretty much how the Culture (or at least Special Circumstances) acts toward its own people and other civilizations respectively.
- Bizarre Alien Reproduction
- The Azadians have three sexes: Males with testes and penis, an intermediate ("Apex") sex with a reversible vagina and ovum, and a female sex with uterus and a retrovirus that slightly modifies the implanted egg.
- Also when Gurgeh is taken to a nightclub/wrestling arena and his guide reassures him about a contestant being suffocated in the mud: "The Uhnyrchal can breathe through their dicks — that guy's fine; he'll be fighting in another club tomorrow night." Then it gets cut off by the victor.
- "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: Inverted. When Gurgeh is blackmailed into playing in Azad, the drone blackmailing him actually tells him, "what I'm doing is an old concept called blackmail." Because the Culture is a utopia, Gurgeh probably hasn't heard of the term blackmail.
- Calvin Ball: Azad is ridiculously complex and no real rules for the game are ever provided to the reader.
- Chekhov's Gun: Subverted the first thing Gurgeh notices upon descending on the capital planet is the labyrinth prison. Flere-Imsaho explains that inside there are complex rules that if followed allow for a swift release. One would expect that Gurgeh would be interned there but it is never mentioned again.
- Confusion Fu: How Gurgeh comes back from behind to win his first game of Azad: he mixes contradictory playstyles to throw off his opponents.
- Didn't Think This Through: Gurgeh accepting the offer of Mawhrin-Skel, a drone who is clearly mentally unstable and loves screwing with people, to help him cheat. It deciding to Blackmail him afterwards isn't that much of a surprise to the reader, though it's implied that everyone in the Culture is normally so nice that such behaviour is genuinely unforeseeable.
- Double-Meaning Title: As is frequently the case with Culture novels. The Player Of Games is of course Gurgeh (it's literally the meaning of his self-chosen middle name), but unsurprisingly, by the end it's pretty clear that Special Circumstances might be the ultimate game-player - using Gurgeh as a piece.
- Enemy Civil War: Azad's leaders are so darwinistic that they end up being more competent at killing each other off than posing a threat to Gurgeh. It helps matters that the main purpose of Azad is to determine status in the Empire rather than to punish upstart outsiders. Numerous departmental rivalries and personal grudges are implied throughout the novel; in particular, the penultimate game features Gurgeh sitting back and calmly gaining points while his opponents, from two different schools of military thought, tear each other to pieces.
- Epunymous Title / Title Drop / You Are the Translated Foreign Word: As is alluded to at the beginning of the novel, in the Culture's language, Marain, the sobriquet Morat in the name of Jernau Morat Gurgeh translates to "the player of games". Towards the end of the novel, an Azadian who knows about the Culture refers to him as Morat, "the player of games". The middle names are effectively self-chosen official nicknames. Lampshaded when another character comments that Gurgeh should have chosen another name: "gambler".
- Everyone Is Bi: It's suggested Gurgeh is kinda weird for never having had sex with a man.
- Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!:
- As Gurgeh is leaving one of his games, victorious, he notices that the terrain around him seems similar to an Azad board ... and if it were an Azad board, then one of his pieces would be in danger of a sneak attack ... and that piece would be himself ... and he dodges the assassins just in time.
- Later on, Gurgeh is playing an Azadian judge, and after a break Gurgeh comes back and starts playing considerably better, with the judge seeing something familiar in Gurgeh's eyes, but not quite being able to put his finger on it. During that break, Gurgeh had been shown the true dark underbelly of Azadian society, and was now operating on Tranquil Fury. Then the judge realises that the look he has given to condemned criminals over the years, is the one he is now receiving from Gurgeh.
- Exposition of Immortality: Chamlis Amalk-Ney, the aging drone who's one of Gurgeh's close friends on Chiark Orbital, is at least four thousand years old by its own admission (no-one is impolite enough to look up its construction date to find out if it's really older). In between the drone's much larger body than a more modern drone, like the warped and snarky Mawhrin-Skel, and those two sniping insults at each other about their respective ages, there's also Gurgeh's own musing about the age of Chamlis and how long the drone's been living on Chiark.
- Extra Parent Conception: The Empire of Azad is ruled by a humanoids with three genders. Male, female and apex. An apex has a reversible set of equipment and carries the fertilized embryo from male to female. All three genders contribute genes, but the knowledge that females are more than passive child bearers is suppressed: the apices are very much on top and exercise crushing sexual discrimination against both other genders.
- Gorn: This (literally "torture porn") is the favored programming of restricted Azadian television stations available to the political and military elite.
- Groin Attack: It is possible to use your genitals as a wager, attacking them in quite a literal way. Not only is this a very effective psychological strategy to use against your opponent (as the risk of a full castration is certainly going to throw you off your game if not pull out entirely) but its mentioned that the origin of a body bet was actually a drive towards making the game fairer for the lower classes as even those without money would always be able to afford to enter the game by betting on their own bodies.
- Hunting "Accident": Some of the Azadians try to arrange an accident for Gurgeh by taking over the powered exoskeleton of one of his hunting partners; it quickly becomes obviously not an accident when the occupant of the exoskeleton starts resisting.
- Humanoid Resources. Near the end of the book, Gurgeh listens to a large band perform. Then one of the Azadians explains how the instruments were made from body parts such as femurs ("do the flutes come in pairs, or are there a lot of one-legged music critics out there?"), skin ("it's called a family of drums"), etc.
- Humans Through Alien Eyes: A brief segment is narrated from the perspective of his Azadian opponent, who mentally describes Gurgeh as vaguely insect-like.
- I Know Mortal Kombat: Gurgeh spots an ambush when he realizes how the area around him is like an Azad board. More generally, the whole Empire is based on the idea that a good Azad player is a good ruler.
- Immortal Immaturity
- It's easy to miss, but Gurgeh makes a comment on how the professor he knows is twice his age, and he refers to her as being into her second century, meaning that he is between fifty and a century old himself (in the final pages, we find out he's 60). While presumably, Gurgeh has developed his masterful game-playing skills in that time, he's really callow in other respects and is about as mature as his young body would suggest.
- Professor Boruelal's behaviour herself is fairly immature for someone twice Gurgeh's age; spending most of it drunk and carousing and bouncing between genders.
- Incendiary Exponent: The final game with the Emperor is played on a planet with a perpetual wildfire running around the equator; the the climax of the game happens just as the fire reaches the castle where the game is being played.
- Language Equals Thought:
- The Culture language, Marain, is a constructed language designed to be as expressive as possible. The Empire language, Eachic, evolved naturally and contains underlying assumptions and a more aggressive attitude. After Gurgeh has spent some time speaking only Eachic, Flere-Imsaho observes he has started playing more like "one of those carnivores he'd been listening to".
- It doesn't seem a coincidence that in the final games against the emperor, when Gurgeh is losing badly Flere-Imsaho has him speak his native Marain for an evening and that after that his attitude and outlook change, including the realisation that his playstyle mimics the Culture and that by becoming the Culture militant he succeeds at coming back and gaining a winning position in the game.
- Lighter and Softer: After the billions of casualties in Consider Phlebas, this is much lighter and softer, although still pretty dark.
