Iain Banks

Iain loved games.  Loved to play them, design them and write about them.

Word games, card games, board games, quizzes, computer games or arcade games, he was a fan.

Games feature heavily in Iain’s novels, both literary and science fiction.  As an avid game player and designer, he had lots to say on the subject and we’ve pulled together some snippets from nearly 30 years of interviews.

“Morality is involved in games we play with one another.  The morality of games is the rules.  Games have a very definite and set morality, you play according to the rules or you don’t play at all.  The difference with the games that we play as human beings is that the rules are always changing.  You can make up your own rules to a certain extent, and there’s a general set of rules but they leave a lot open to how you play the game yourself.  It’s trying to make the connection between the games that societies play on each other and on the individuals within those societies and the games played on the basic interpersonal level.  Now, I don’t know the answer to all that, I do not know why everything is the way it is.  I’m still trying to work towards that, but certainly in the books I try to use games as symbols of the way we react to one another and to society.  There’s a conscious effort to make sense of all that, but there’s no conscious answer because it’s too difficult for any one individual.  You can put down the evidence, saying ‘this is the way I see it.’  But in fiction the trick is to give people a choice of potential answers so they can disagree with what you’re saying, or what you think you’re saying.”

“I love games... I love what they represent, in terms of an encapsulated life, almost – it’s like a little slice of life, where you have certain rules you need to follow to win.  They’re such handy symbols as well, they are actually narratives of a sort.  There are lots of links between games and stories, certainly there’s still a lot of perhaps unexplored links there but...I just think games are neat, really.  So I just keep mentioning them, they’re like songs and music...”games are neat, man!”

“[Despot (in Complicity)] was sort of modelled on Civilisation.  It’s what I thought Civ might grow into.  I was such an avid Civ player that, when I sat down to write a book last October, I wiped the disks.  And now I really miss it.  You can’t buy Civ anymore, so I’m trying to get a copy of Civ 2.  I used to play SimCity a lot, too.  I’ve been fairly quiet on the games front for a while.  I bought Rebel Assault, but... well, I’m more of a strategy games fan.”

“[I do seem to lean towards the god game], though I was a long-time ace at Asteroids.  I’ve just got an updated shareware version which, guiltily, I keep playing.  I keep meaning to get a dollar account and send this chap $15...but Asteroids was my game, which does date me, I’m afraid.  With all due modesty, I have to say I was brilliant at it.”

“I think both stories and games are, at least potentially, kind of rehearsals for life; basically pedagogy, wrapped up in a sweet coating to make the learning fun. And they're both linear, have themes, characters, and so on. So the same things interest me about both games and stories; principally the potential for serious play.”

“[Empire! (in The Steep Approach to Garbadale) is based on Risk].  I was a Risk adept, I’ll have you know.  Well, I thought so at the time.  At one point in the early Seventies, I’d won 13 out of the 15 games my pals and I had played over the course of one summer (and, patently, remembered this statistic).  I believed then that this was because I was a genius.  In fact it was because I had a car.  This kept me sober while my chums were all roaring drunk and often stoned as well so not taking the game entirely seriously, while I was.  I even designed a sort of super-Risk that featured a variable geography board and lots of different types of units, plus different terrains and resources and so on.  I never did persuade any of my pals to play it with me, though I had a lot of geeky fun test-playing it.  Anyway, Sid Meier did it a lot better.”

“[The game of Azad in The Player of Games] is actually their life, it genuinely is a reflection of the life of the Empire.  Because life in the Empire is beastly, and it is a beastly game.  You’re expected to win, and to win you defeat somebody else, not try and co-operate with them.  In a way Gurgeh’s trying to do that, in certain bits.  Towards the very last few games he has the game taped in such a way that he can actually set the game up not as a conflict but as a means of co-operation, a beautiful song.  And he actually lets the Empire take over the Culture in the game; he lets the Emperor take him over, but again he knows that his values will take over the Empire.  It’s like the invading army and Rome – it might invade and apparently win but it becomes the thing it originally invaded.  In terms of the game of Azad, the Culture’s ethos is better than the Empire’s, therefore the Empire appears to win but will get taken over.  That’s why the Emperor just goes crazy.”

“The reason games are attractive in that way is because they’re ready-made symbols, the whole idea of the game is an automatic symbol of life, because all games are in a way small attributes of life, small sections that people try to codify and make into a game.  It’s also a mental exercise, we exercise our brains with games because we can’t exercise them any more by hunting for animals.  So the game is a ready-made symbol for our attempts to understand life.  Games are structured in the same way that novels are structured, or can be.”