Mark W. Tiedemann has said some awesomely nice things about This Is Not a Game over on irosf.com.
When Williams is good, he is very good—and this is one of his best. He dances across the lines that blur real world and gameplaying with elegance and an acerbic sense of consequences that denies the artificial separation between the two worlds. When games grow large and complex enough, he suggests, they become the real world. The more factors added in to “flesh it out,” the more a game takes on all the unanticipated aspects of real life. In this case, greed, jealousy, murder—and, as an added wrinkle, international politics.
People get drawn in from the various and unexpected touch points of the game world and get mangled in the course of discovering they have crossed a line somewhere and now, This Is Not A Game. In many ways, it never was, as Dagmar learns.
On another level, Williams is exploring the parameters of so-called social networking in a sphere of global communication that separates people by nanoseconds through myriad links that often bypass the comfortable and comprehensible channels through which we expect events to transpire. The connections made with communities that have utterly divergent, yet occasionally sympathetic, interests demonstrate the potential for cause and consequence unmediated by “authorized” intercessors.
Glowing praise like this should only motivate you to purchase a copy.
I did, and I loved it. And now I give up, and I must ask. A, B, C, D – a whim, or…?
Alpha Bravo Charlie Dog was deliberate, and would have been an element in an ARG that might have been released along with the book, except that it wasn't.
Alas.
Good to know. It was really driving me nuts once I noticed. 🙂
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