Book Review: Press Start to Play
A short story collection about video games
Press Start to Play is a short story anthology from a range of different authors, tied together through the theme of video games. The majority of these stories would fall under sci-fi/fantasy or speculative fiction, exploring the impact of video games on the characters’ lives and relationships, and sometimes even imagining the point of view of the game characters themselves. There were a lot of big sci-fi names here, like Ernest Cline, Andy Weir, Seanan McGuire, and even Ken Liu.
As with many story anthologies, the stories can be a hit or miss, but Press Start to Play definitely contained more hits than misses for me, and I’m hard-pressed to pick even three top favourites. Despite my game addiction phase which I’ve recently managed to claw my way out of, I honestly haven’t played a whole range of games myself, and definitely not most of the types of games that these stories draw on, but that didn’t make it any less enjoyable. I loved reading how these stories used games and gaming as narrative devices, parallels to the “real world” of the story, or as some sort of otherworldly disruption of the mundane.
Mini-reviews of each of the stories are below:
“God Mode” by Daniel H. Wilson
A game developer college student and his girlfriend are what appears to be the end of the world, with the things around them gradually being “uploaded” into another space, presumably a game. Throughout the story, he observes the way the things around him start to appear rendered, and there’s this disembodied voice seemingly announcing the progress of the upload.
“NPC” by Charles Yu
A nameless character goes through the motions of what he’s supposed to do, but one act of deviation from the script he’d been given lands him a promotion from an NPC to a playable character. The promotion comes with increasing and dynamic stats, and lots of missions, but he realises that in becoming playable, he has lost agency, because he is now responding to someone else’s whims. I enjoyed this one a lot.
“Respawn” by Hiroshi Sakurazaka
The narrator lives an unassuming life in a restaurant when he gets accidentally murdered, and realises his consciousness has been transferred to his killer’s body. Throughout the story, his consciousness keeps displacing that of the person who had killed him, and he finds himself pulled into a yakuza scheme. All this man wants is to go back to his mundane existence, so he decides the best way to do that is first to take out the yakuza network he’d been embroiled in.
“Desert Walk” by S.R. Mastrantone
The main character purchases a copy of the game Desert Walk, intending to find the hidden meaning behind the game, because he is convinced there is a hidden meaning, some sort of code or reward exclusively for someone who can complete it. He toils through the game, walking through featureless desert, until he encounters signs of an emaciated child. A relatively brief, and very eerie piece.
“Rat Catcher’s Yellows” by Charlie Jane Anders
Grace’s girlfriend Shary has a mysterious illness called Rat Catcher’s Yellows, which leaves her mostly immobile, and also eats away at her mind. In order to keep Shary occupied, Grace buys her a popular cat-themed world-building game called Divine Right of Cats, which Shary was originally resistant to, but comes to become virtually obsessed with. It appears that people afflicted with the same condition as Shary are particularly good at this game, solving problems and conceptualising court politics in a way that unafflicted cannot replicate. Despite the tragedy of the illness, there is also something affirming about the second chance that this game offers to people with the condition. One of my favourites in this anthology.
“1UP” by Holly Black
A group of friends who met each other through online gaming, meet each other for the first time at the funeral of one of their number. The “deceased” friend leaves clues via a text-based game to lead the others to saving him before it’s too late. I loved this one.
“Survival Horror” by Seanan McGuire
A roguish narrator and her cousin get sucked into a malicious horror game, which turns out to be an assassination attempt on her cousin’s life. They need to figure out a way to leave this game without dying. This story mixes the sci-fi of game plots with fantastical creatures like succubi—which brought my mind to Cyber Mage. Another fun piece.
“REAL” by Django Wexler
A man designs most of the elements of a video game called REAL but the elements/characters in it become too real, gain sentience, and start killing people (starting with players and the game’s chosen heroines). It all comes to a head with the appearance of the game’s villain, the Dark Queen.
“Outliers” by Nicole Feldringer
A woman plays a game about saving the environment and realises her game is rigged to keep corporations content; not too much earth-saving can be done while the game is beholden to these entities, and so she strikes a deal to be able to break through that score ceiling and continue to be able to save the environment.
<end game> by Chris Avellone
A simple text-based game takes on a sinister edge: is the reader Warren, and stuck in the game the same way he is, and doomed to live an endless loop? Most of this story is written in the form of a text-based game, with very little narration, and the objective for both Warren and the reader/player is to end the game, if that’s even possible.
“Save me plz” by David Barr Kirtley
In this story, Meg’s boyfriend Devon is convinced that real life is as much a simulation as a video game, with the main difference being that a video game world is constructed with much more intentionality and love from its creator. Devon endeavours to remake the world like his video game world, one with more wonder and intentionality, trapping her in a time loop as he chips away at what used to be the real world so that he can remake it in his favourite game world’s image. I enjoyed this one a lot.
“The Relive Box” by T.C. Boyle
A divorced single father keeps returning to and replaying his past relationships through a relive box, a device that lets him replay any past moment of his life in a VR simulation. The people around him seem to be doing the same thing, ironically forgetting to live in the present in order to create memories worth returning to in the first place.
“Roguelike” by Marc Laidlaw
The title explains the story, and this piece is hilarious. In “Roguelike”, assassins are trained through a roguelike simulator to get through several levels of a dungeon to kill the emperor; each new assassin needs to learn from the mistakes of the dead assassin before them and try to progress further. The last assassin snaps and destroys the simulator itself.
This was one of the shorter stories, but it captured the mechanics of how a roguelike dungeon crawler game works, and made it very entertaining via dumb ways to die.
“All the people in your party have died” by Robin Wasserman
A schoolteacher in an increasingly conservative school starts playing Oregon Trail and naming the characters in her wagon after people she knows in real life; the results of the game seem to bleed into her real life, starting with one boy in her class breaking his leg.
“Recoil!” by Micky Neilson
Jimmy finds himself in a shooter game simulation to determine which faction of the military—Enforcers or Peacekeppers—he would be more suited for depending on the decisions he makes during the simulation.
“Anda’s Game” by Cory Doctorow
An organisation of girl gamers who play collaboratively in a PVP MMORPG find themselves stumbling into an exploitative child labour war between rival factories in the Global South. There’s also the parallel sub-plot of obesity, a manifestation of Global North greed, and how it slowly fades as Anda fights for others rather than to gorge herself. I enjoyed this a lot.
“Coma Kings” by Jessica Barber
Narrator is one of the top players of an online game called Coma, and her sister Annie has rigged herself permanently to the game, keeping her in a comatose state while her family try to adapt to life without her being present.
“Stats” by Marguerite K. Bennett
An obnoxious white cishet man submits his DNA to a game and they mess with his stats, changing details about him like his race, gender, and build, to let him experience what it’s like to be marginalised—all this does is make him go on a rampage.
“Please Continue” by Chris Kluwe
A character goes through the motions of a combat-based game, training and levelling up and climbing the ranks—until a “disruptive” thought occurs to him and shatters the dreamlike rote of the game space. This leads to a tonal shift into politics and representation, games as expression, and the pushback from conservatives in reaction to “woke” elements in games.
“Creation Screen” by Rhianna Pratchett
One of my favourite pieces. “Creation Screen” is narrated from the point of view of the playable character in an RPG, in a one-way conversation with the player. The character observes the differences in their own carefully designed and controlled world, and the chaos and irregularities of the world beyond the screen. The character grows to care for the player, and wishes to be able to cross through the screen to take care of the player.
“The Fresh Prince of Gamma World” by Austin Grossman
This is a story of post-apocalyptic parallel worlds and a main character who seems to be the only person who remembers the original, non-game world they all hailed from.
“Gamer’s End” by Yoon Ha Lee
I’ve never read Ender’s Game, but I suspected the story’s title was a reference to that, and it turned out the story itself is a reference to it. In “Gamer’s End”, the protagonist goes through a simulation game that trains them in battle tactics and combat for an impending invasion, intended to end a long drawn-out war between the Kel and the Shuos.
“The Clockwork Soldier” by Ken Liu
As expected, I loved this one. The parallels between the main narrative of the bounty hunter and her “prey” Ryder vs the characters in the story, the doubling of the name Alex as the hunter in real life and the unaware princess in the game, were incredible. Where do we draw the line in how much humanity we are willing to acknowledge in another being? Is it when they are given sentience? And what if we are the ones withholding that sentience from them to make them easier to exploit, if it is exploitation?
Ken Liu forces Alex the character to uncover the truth behind Ryder’s story, via the text-based game that Ryder had designed to tell his story, a story that Alex the character in his game uncovers about herself in parallel.
“Killswitch” by Catherynne M. Valente
This story is about a horror/mystery game called Killswitch which can only be played once and never again, as it deletes itself upon completion. The story chronicles the gameplay as one of the playable characters, interwoven with the small player community of that game. Interesting and mysterious, and makes me want to play the game myself.
“Twarrior” by Andy Weir
This short story was incredibly funny. A man receives mysterious messages from what turns out to be a programme that he wrote 31 years ago while he was a student; the programme grew and gained some sort of sentience, crawling the web for decades and learning everything, including how to hack banking systems and erase police records. This powerful programme offers to help its “creator”, who wants nothing more than to make the world a better place but did not have the means to do so.
“Select Character” by Hugh Howey
Donna plays her husband Jamie’s military tactics game on her own terms during the hours he’s away at work and she has some time alone after putting their baby to sleep. Jamie returns home early one day and watches Donna play, surprised at how differently she plays the game: not to score points by shooting enemy troops, but by fixing a rundown shop and growing plants in it.