This is Not a Game

Orbit (2009)
ISBN: 9781841496573
$32.99
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Reviewed by MacLaren North, Oct 2009


Author of nearly thirty novels and collections, Walter Jon Williams has written on a wide variety of subjects within speculative fiction. In the 1980s, he rode the wave of cyberpunk with Hardwired, Voice of the Whirlwind and Angel Station, before turning his attention to other sub-genres such as space opera with the Dread Empire’s Fall trilogy. Williams is also known to be a gamer and has written role-playing game supplements and thus writes from an informed position with respect to the subject matter of this novel.

This is Not a Game is a near-future thriller set in the world of tech start-ups, online gaming, virtual communities and high finance. The story revolves around Dagmar, a producer of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), essentially elaborate scavenger hunts with online and real-world components. In an ARG, players might hunt for clues in an email, only to find a real phone number to call to speak with an actor playing a role that leads them to the next clue. Dagmar, a failed science fiction writer, has become an expert at designing and producing these elaborate spectacles – usually to promote some other product such as a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game – and has attracted a loyal online following of puzzle geeks, computer experts and reality hackers.

Dagmar forms part of a quartet of major characters, all friends from their university role-playing group. Charlie heads a highly successful software business and, as a sideline, runs Great Big Idea, the gaming company that employs Dagmar. Austin has become a venture capitalist and has a better-than-average knack for wrangling high concepts into actual products. BJ is the brilliant but easily distracted estranged member of the group – a former lover of Dagmar and former business partner of Charlie, who Charlie forcibly ejected from the company they co-founded. BJ now ekes out a living in tech Customer Service hell, with a sideline as a gold farmer in online games. Each, as always, harbours their own secrets and motivations, which progressively intertwine.

While returning from India from the closing event of an ARG she produced, Dagmar becomes trapped in Jakarta just as the Indonesian currency collapses and the government falls. Bunkered in her hotel, she is offered hope of rescue from Israeli mercenaries hired by Charlie. To pass the time, she starts thinking about her next ARG, basing it on a woman trapped alone in a hotel, while chaos reigns outside. Quickly it becomes apparent the mercenaries are not going to be able to rescue her with any speed and she turns to her online community of ARG aficionados. These largely anonymous folk prove far more effective at arranging a rescue from a city with no functioning government but with Internet access. But some of her online followers still question whether this is yet another of Dagmar’s elaborate games.

On her return to the US, Dagmar throws herself into her work, using her Jakarta adventure as the inspiration for her next ARG. But her life begins to unravel when a motorcycle-riding assassin guns down Austin in the Great Big Idea company car park as she watches. Again she turns to her online community to help identify and track down the killer, weaving the threads of this real-world murder into her new ARG. Meanwhile other national currencies and economies continue to crash, eerily echoing her experiences in Indonesia.

Again Dagmar’s online community comes through for her, but the revelations are unexpected and disturbing: why does Charlie have a bank account containing $12 billion in the Cayman Islands, did an assassin from the Russian Maffiya mistake Austin for Charlie and why is Charlie now requiring her to weave in such diverse elements as cryptographic software and water contamination testing monitors into her new game? Charlie will brook no discussion on the matter, giving her an unlimited budget and an order to get on with the project. Needing both technical assistance and personal support, Dagmar turns to somewhere she never thought she would return to - and which Charlie would never approve of – their estranged friend BJ. The last third of the novel explores the consequences of this decision, while further weaving reality and the game together. But Dagmar, used to being the puppetmaster for these events, now finds that someone else is manipulating the game, and herself.

Williams could well have called this book And the Geek Shall Inherit the Earth, as it presents a not uncommon geek fantasy of secretly manipulating world events through the clever use of technology. Against a story which is rather grim at times, the author presents a very hopeful – probably overly optimistic - vision of the power of online communities and the notion that enough altruistic people working together out in the world can solve any problem. The author also explores the nature of money and the financial system: is the world economy merely a consensual hallucination, easily tipped into chaos through subtle manipulation? What happens when the markets are subjected to unintentional meddling by people who are too smart for their own good, or who treat the world markets like a game? In this regard, the novel seems prescient with regards the recent financial crisis, although the forces at work within the novel differ from the real-world manipulations. Unfortunately Williams explores these ideas in only a cursory manner.

While the prose is very readable, the story and the characters suffer from limited characterisation and a lack of subtlety or dramatic irony in the closing chapters. Dagmar herself is never clearly drawn – aside from her prematurely silver hair, poor taste in men and talent for designing elaborate games, there is little sense of her as a person. Similarly, her three former gaming compatriots are very thinly realised. They, like most of the minor characters in the book, are typical geek stereotypes.

Williams has written a pacey, entertaining book, however the novel does not rise above the relatively simple characterisation and plotting of an average movie techno-thriller. The plot twists are telegraphed and the characters end up being exactly what they appear to be at first glance. The book is however highly topical for those interested in online gaming and virtual communities (which excludes this reviewer) and those involved with such pursuits may find this book links neatly with those interests. This contemporary relevance does however mean that the book will not date well, as already some of the technical references (e.g. to mobile phone technology) seem out of date. Readers unfamiliar with Williams’ work will find greater depth and more interesting ideas in his earlier books, particularly his cyberpunk novels.