Over the past few old age , a spate of terrific science fable novels about videogames have asked what will happen to play — and gamers — in the future . Will political elections be decided by videogame ? Will ohmic resistance movements be organized by guilds ? And who will check the plot spaces that already control so much of our imaginations ? Here are ten novel ( OK , one is a novelette ) that grapple with these questions .
Artwork for Ready Player One by Gordon Jones .
For this list , I wanted to concentrate on novels that are explicitly about videogames , gamers , and game developers . Though there are many futuristic novel sport virtual humans or internet - like places that are clear modeled on videogames , those book are n’t about videogames per se .
1 . Player of Games , by Iain M. Banks ( 1988 )
The oldest book on our list , Player of Games was the second novel bank building publishedin his pop Culture series , set in a very distant , post - human future where posterity of Earth have spread out across the galaxy and joined violence with aliens and AI . The main character Gurgeh is a notoriously brilliant control board game thespian who gets raise by the Culture ’s version of MI6 , called Special Circumstances , to play an immersive practical reality game on another major planet . That biz sour out to be meander into the fabric of the planet ’s political culture , and Gurgeh ’s problem is n’t just to win – it ’s to overthrow the planet ’s political science . Like many other videogame stories , this novel is less about videogames per se than it is about how such game are a metaphor for other aspects of our lives . In other words , The Player of Games is n’t about gaming as gambling — it ’s about play as life .
https://gizmodo.com/welcome-to-the-culture-the-galactic-civilization-that-354739
2 . The Restoration Game , by Ken MacLeod ( 2010 )
It ’s interesting to contrast MacLeod ’s later novel with The Player of Games because The Restoration Game also shell out with how videogames shape political power . But it also reverberate how much our understanding of videogames has change . MacLeod does n’t need to take his characters to another major planet ; or else , he takes us into the cubicles of a videogame company developing a nationalistic MMO that the CIA hopes will stir up a rotation in a fabricated Eastern European country . We move between the politics of videogame exploitation and the politics of engineered revolution , only to discover that one of the sterling secrets of the former Soviet Union is a sort of cosmic easter egg . ( Our review ishere . )
https://gizmodo.com/secrets-from-a-post-soviet-alternate-history-could-dest-5837311
3 . Halting State , by Charles Stross ( 2008)In the first of his two link detective novel that focus on futurist cybercrime , Stross plunges us into a world of virtual theft and net infection . As investigators examine to get across the thievery of several thousand euro worth of game particular in an MMO , we lento learn that more than gamer gold is at stake . Chinese hackers have infiltrate the linchpin of the European internet , opening a gap surety hole that could bring down governments as well as gamer goblins .
4 . For The Win , by Cory Doctorow ( 2010 )
Written for a young adult audience and set mostly in Asia , For The Win is about new citizenry who make their sustenance performing videogames , and who use their practical guilds to organize a substantial - universe parturiency movement . It conflate many of the preoccupations of MacLeod and Stross ’ work , but focus entirely on how MMOs can construct up effective resistance movement . Here we see the victory of gamers over secret plan designers , and the oppressed lower course being empowered , rather than being used by surety power to bring down enemy authorities . Doctorow ’s novel is one of the most Utopian in the writing style .
5 . Reamde , by Neal Stephenson ( 2011 )
Stephenson ’s new novel deals with Chinese goldfarmers , much like Doctorow ’s For the Win . But these goldfarmers are n’t masters of their own luck ; instead they ’re swept up into a undercover agent plot that entangles everyone from MMO developers to anti - American terrorists . Like Doctorow , Stephenson makes the point that MMOs add multitude together in unexpected ways . But rather of helping people to describe their shared political and economical interests , the MMO in Reamde is simply a fascinating plot gadget that speeds the techno - thriller ’s plot of ground along . ( Our critique ishere . )
https://gizmodo.com/neal-stephensons-reamde-is-a-high-tech-incarnation-of-t-5849371
6 . Ready Player One , by Ernest Cline ( 2011 )
Cline believes , as Doctorow does , that MMOs can help the persecute find each other and fight back against the despotic techno - entertainment complex . The novel focuses on group of gamers trying to ascertain easter eggs that will unlock the keys to an eccentric videogame tycoon ’s immense fortune . The tycoon has leave his money to any gamer wily enough to witness the “ three keys . ” If our fighter , wiz of the MMO ’s freewheeling , anonymous organization , bring home the bacon the keys , the MMO stays free and anonymous . If the corporate gamers crop for an malign company exact the keys , the MMO will become a salary - to - play , commercialized shadow of its former ego . Here , the fight to save the MMO is intelligibly tinged with political sympathies — but the book is also about the power of friendship forged in gameworlds , as well as the sheer exhilaration of gaming . ( Our review ishere . )
https://gizmodo.com/ready-player-one-is-a-dystopian-gamer-novel-thats-as-ad-5830019
7 . Omnitopia Dawn , by Diane Duane ( 2010 )
The first in a new serial by Duane , best known for her fantasy novels , Omnitopia Dawn is the tarradiddle of an anarchic , fantasy - oriented MMO , Omnitopia , on the eve of a giant upgrade . As the biz ’s rules careen beneath characters ’ feet , a war brews between the game ’s Jehovah , who are champions of open source , and a rival who runs a company that only cares about commercializing the practical world . A like clash brewage in Ready Player One . Indeed , the warfare between good developer who agitate for the user , vs. vicious corporate overlords who want to homogenize the system , is an ancient figure in this genre . It goes all the way back to the original Tron , and in all likelihood before .
8 . The Gravity Pilot , by M. M. Buckner ( 2011 )
While most novels about videogames in the future take as a given that the game can serve either the powers of good or iniquity , this book by M. M. Buckner is a atavist to an older mode of videogame storytelling . Here , there is a stark line drawn between the tangible world , where our hero Orr is a superstar skydiver , and the iniquity of the cyberworld , which convert our other hero Vera into a cyberaddicted techno - slave . It ’s never really clear why the ultra - dangerous practice of skydiving is somehow better than cyberaddiction — you ’re just hypothesize to infer that cyber is mechanically more dread than anything else .
9 . “ Ghost in the car , ” by Mercedes Lackey ( 2010)A novella from the book Trio of Sorcery , “ Ghost in the Machine ” is a classic technical school - gnosis taradiddle of a sorceress whose power reach out into the cyberworld of an MMO . She ’s who you call when the power of darkness go to parcel out cheat codes .
10 . Extras , by Scott Westerfeld ( 2007 )
In this novel from the Uglies series , humanity has just undergone a societal and economic transformation . citizenry who were once dulled into passiveness by medical treatments to make them inactive and middling have been free , and now everyone — including political science — are trying to figure out what to do with themselves . City - states are spring their own eldritch new cultures , and in Yokohama , Japan , this involves sucking every citizen into a report economy where citizenry earn “ face compass point ” when their biotic community likes something they do . Our protagonist is a journalist who strain to hit points for getting the better scoops , and in the process uncovers a young underground movement .
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