This was a super quick read. And not a wholly satisfying one. Williams is a well know sci-fi author and was one of the early writers within the “cyberpunk” arena via his novel “Hardwired”.
“This Is Not A Game” (TINAG) is not cyberpunk and barely qualifies as sci-fi. Its time period is the “present” or really the “present” when the book was written in about 2010. At that point many of the gaming and technology concepts may have seemed advanced but have been really outpaced in just the past 10 years. The most prescient parts of the work lie in the realm of government, tech firms, politics, monetary policies, global conflict, and automated/machine learning investment bots coming together as forces for chaos.
The focus of the internal conflict of the work revolves around a firm and its founders who create and run real world “alternate reality games” where real people participate in fictional events occurring in the real world—think “solving puzzles that reveal more information about a larger mystery within drips and drabs of information populated around the globe all leading to a satisfying conclusion”. The real world participants are drawn in and used by the principal characters to solve a real world series of murders and financial mysteries.
Far more a “thriller” than a work of sci-fi the characters are poorly drawn and cliche. The story not all that thrilling—rather than focus on the run of the mill nerds and gamers participating in these issues, I’m far more interested in the Russian mafia, Chinese investors, the private military contractors, and global players causing the downfall of large economies. All of these get short shrift in the work and instead we get the primary characters swimming in hotel pools and having lunch in a diner.
The best parts of the work are the real world action sequences and descriptions and its here Williams should focus. The descriptions of the growing chaos and fall of Jakarta as well as the closing assassination descriptions work best. The “gamer” interactions and internal dialogues which make up the bulk of the work are the weakest.
Feel free to pass.