B. R. Collins

Rick is a gamerunner in a massive virtual reality RPG in a dystopian future world. His job is to look for bugs in the code, and he gets to play all day and live well in a protected bubble in the headquarters of the company who make the game. His father, Daed, is the game creator.

Things go sour one day when someone finds a hack into the roots of the maze and looks like he will successfully complete the RPG quest for the very first time. Rick is sent in to stop him, because under no circumstances must the game be finished.

This book was a fast moving adventure that built heavily on the dystopian genre and on computer gaming trends. The world has suffered climate catastrophes so that the air poisons you and the rain will kill you. The rich cocoon themselves away from a world that is disintegrating right outside of their little bubbles of safety.

The book had promise, but it was really a pretty miserable lead, and the story did not so much as finish as come to a crashing halt with pretty much everything unexplained and unresolved. As a story, this book fails. It felt like Murukami for young adults, and I am no fan of Murukami's habit of just abandoning his plot when he seems to get bored of writing!

So I tried to think if there was something deeper going on with the story. Why had I invested my time in reading a book that failed to resolve itself? What was it trying to tell me? I decided that the author was probably trying to make the story like a video game that also leaves you feeling like it is unresolved and demands you play it again. That may be why he chose to end the way he did - it was all a video game analogy.

That may be what he intended but it was not a video game, it was a story, so I did not much like the ending.

Is it a story that makes you think, though? Perhaps on that score it succeeds a little. You get a strong sense of "there must be more to life than this" from this book, although the book doesn't find anything more. In fact it all felt very nihilistic and depressing. A couple of faint touches of humour lift it slightly, but really this book must be aimed at angsty teenagers with a penchant for wearing black and playing violent video games.

I don't think I will be recommending it to anyone.… (mais)

Posted to my Livejournal in August 2008, saved here for posterity:

The Traitor Game affected me quite a lot (I read a lot of books this summer that made me cry). It's a psychological drama/fantasy, and it follows Michael, who has PTSD over past severe bullying, and his friend Francis, who has a secret. The two boys develop a fantasy world called Evgard together, and the chapters switch between the real world and the fantasy one, where the story follows a slave boy and his tenuous friendship with the princely son of the king (duke?) who owns him. In the real world, Michael and Francis have a serious falling out over a misperceived betrayal, and then a real betrayal, and what happens in Evgard mirrors it and centers around a game the people in Evgard play called The Traitor Game. The Evgard stuff was so compelling and detailed and unique that I wished there was more of it, but I loved the way the two stories twined together around the themes of friendship and betrayal.… (mais)