| $@%&! level: Low "Bedroom" level: Low Violence level: Medium-Low Back Cover: "What if life as we know it was just a game? What if, instead of traditional schools, children learned by participating in a virtual reality simulation, one that allowed them to experience 'life' from birth to death -- multiple times? What if one player, on his final play, could change the world forever...?" |
So the whole setup of this book, which does take a little while to figure out, is that this world, life on earth as we know it, is actually nothing more than a virtual reality teaching program being played by school children from a different world. If you’re looking for religious parallels, it follows the reincarnation idea pretty solidly, with the children starting out as less complex organisms and advancing as they do well in their previous lives until eventually they make it to humanity. By the time they reach eighteen years, most of these kids will have lived through half a dozen or more lifetimes and have all the memories associated with those lives, which in theory ought to make them more than adequately prepared to function in the real world.
But you can tell that something is off from nearly the very beginning. First of all, there’s the whole forgetting your previous lives every time you’re born. I’ve never understood that, especially if this is supposed to be used as a teaching tool. I mean, how can you really learn and advance in your education if you don’t remember anything, and all you take with you is your instincts for playing the game well. Wouldn’t you end up doing the same things over and over again? How do you learn anything that way?
Then there’s what happens if you end up flunking out of the Game, which is where you get the other bit of religious parallel, because it turns out that those who do badly end up in public school (which is a fair analog to Hell, complete with slavery, starvation, and daily beatings), while those who do really well end up wealthy, popular, and living in the lap of luxury one way or another. So yeah, the Game was sold to the world as a way to make the school system better, but in most ways it actually made things worse. There’s a solid commentary on our own public schools, if you want one. (On a slightly related note, although the story was generally well written, some of the dialogue was way too formal. My teachers would have marked me down for that.)
What kept me reading, though, was the mystery of it all. The two main characters end up in the Game, falling in love, getting married, being remarkably successful, and incidentally starting a religious movement based on the idea that life is actually a virtual reality game, an idea which they seem to have been born with, but which is fleshed out when they find a book that was written by one of them in a previous life. Like I said, mind bending. So they have a fairly interesting story that goes through 40 years, just hitting the highlights, but the mystery and suspense of it all is happening elsewhere. You get all kinds of hints about the Game creator, that both he and his father and the AI computer that runs everything all have their own agendas and goals, and they’re probably working at cross purposes. But you never get all the answers to understand totally what’s going on, and it all ends in a cliff-hanger fit to cause hair pulling. It’s just lucky that a second book is available. I don’t know if I’ll read the sequel, due to my well-known dislike for dystopia, but I would be totally up in arms if the author thought it would be okay to leave the story like this.