The player of games
by Iain Banks · first published 1988
59% recommend35% neutral7% critical
Why HN recommends it
Widely recommended as the best entry point to Banks's Culture series: engaging and easier to follow than Consider Phlebas, with a gripping story about an empire built on a game, and more about ideas than tech.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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.
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What Hacker News says
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Now go read "The Player of Games", by Iain M. Banks, to see that idea taken to extremes.
on “AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5” ↗…and fundamentally makes no sense on any level, and then the magic unfolded proton at the end was just a deus ex machina with no connection to anything. For the calibration comparison, I did enjoy The Player of Games; I felt the setup was a little clunky (the bit about provability of recordings by Minds should have been set up beforehand to give the reader a fair understanding of the world) and I struggled a little…
on “China talking with European Space Agency about moon outpost” ↗By a large margin my favourite author. The Wasp Factory was the first novel of his I read and it was great, but Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games utterly blew my mind.
on “A Personal Statement from Iain Banks” ↗"The Player of Games" by Iain M. Banks. I love serious literature, I love non-fiction, and I love business & tech books, but I decided to give sci-fi a shot again and a friend leant me this book: wow. Fascinating, rip-roaring,…
on “Ask HN: Best book you read in 2010 and briefly why” ↗Fourthing the Culture series. I've read most of them now and the highlights for me are Look To Windward, Player of Games and Fearsum Endjinn (stick with that one). I also rate Excession and Matter though I know a lot of other people think they're weaker. Atlas Shrugged has been called the 'second most influential book…
on “Sci-Fi Novels You Should Read” ↗Those books exist. Daemon and FreedomTM are one pair of books that might be right up your alley. The Culture series describes what is arguably the best possible science fiction society to live in. Player of Games is a good introduction to the series, which shows off what the Culture is by taking you, in the shoes of one of its denizens, to a place that's a high contrast. David Brin always preaches scifi optimism,…
on “The Rise of Dystopian Fiction” ↗…one. In my view, these people are broken. So personally, I wonder about how we keep broken people in check, and how we rework society to produce fewer broken people. There's a great bit in Iain Banks's Player of Games where the main character, who is from a post-scarcity utopia, visits a classic stellar empire, one clearly a stand-in for the worst parts of our current culture. The rich, imperial upper class types he's…
on “Storj: Not a Dropbox Killer” ↗Iain Banks. His "Culture" novels are maybe the smartest space opera ever written. start with Player of Games. The various books have no common plot thread, can be read completely out of order; Player is by far the most accessible.
on “Neal Stephenson reacts to Facebook name change” ↗Player of Games is the second book, and the one I recommend people start The Culture series with. The first book Consider Phlebas isn't bad, but it isn't as well developed as the rest of the series IMO.
on “Player of Games” ↗Have you ever read "The Player of Games" by Iain M. Banks? We won't win by allowing the enemy to make us more like them.
on “Regarding Proposed US Restrictions on RISC-V” ↗Fiction: Iain Banks (the bridge; wasp factory; walking on glass; player of games). Ender's game. Asimov. Dostoyevski. Ayn Rand (Fountainhead). Sigurd Hoel. (excellent norwegian writer) Non-fiction: stuff about military strategy (Sun Tzu, Clausewitz; musashi - the book of 5 rings).…
on “Do Hackers read *other* books?” ↗"Worlds of Exile and Illusion" (Hainish cycle collection) and "The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K Le Quin "Singularity Sky" by Charles Stross "The Player of Games" by Iain M Banks
on “Ask HN: What are your favorite books of 2010?” ↗…the things that comes up over and over in Banks's work is encounters between developed and primitive cultures. He uses the contrasts to examine where we've come from, who we are, and where we might go. Player of Games in particular to me spends a lot of time looking at the desire to win, and also the desire to play for high stakes. The Culture's post-scarcity society makes bets meaningless. How does somebody with a…
on “A Personal Statement from Iain Banks” ↗Good to hear. I also just purchased Player of Games... for the 3rd time... I think I'm going to read through the Culture novels again... for the 2nd or 3rd time.
on “A Personal Statement from Iain Banks” ↗…off-putting. It is a real throwback to the 50s style of scifi, big ideas but terrible characters and a plot that bounces is strange directions. If nothing else, it was an interesting change. I also enjoyed The Player of Games but found it suffered from Ian M Banks syndrome - unlikable characters being forced into unenviable situations. But the plot was great. I have longer reviews of: https://sheep.horse/2017/3/book_review_-_the_three-body_prob...…
on “China talking with European Space Agency about moon outpost” ↗