The tournament arc is one of my least favorite tropes in any kind of action driven story, be it fantasy or science fiction, in any medium not limited to but including manga, anime, cartoon, comic book, novel, series or stand alone. It always feels like filler, light on character or plot or much of anything, just a random series of conflicts that build up to the main one in which the world/universe/whatever as we know it is at stake. None of that is quite true of The Player of Games; yet this is quite possibly one of the blandest sci-fi stories I’ve encountered, to the point where some things could almost be interesting but they are not, and I kept waiting for something that never quite came.
Granted, I’ve not read Iain M. Banks before, and maybe it would be more interesting if I had whatever backstory of the world of Culture at least from the first novel, but the plot isn’t really that complex, the characters have very little color or personality, and neither does the main attraction, the game of Azad (name of both the game, society, and also planet?/Empire). Supposedly Gurgeh is the bestest game player ever in Culture, but there’s no real detail, either in the character who just seems kind of bored, or in any of the games, before or during the Azad tournament. Azad is a game that supposedly governs most aspects of the planet’s society, but there’s no detail about what the game/s is/are. There seems to be a card aspect, and maybe some kind of chess-like side that involved moving pieces around, but there’s no real information about what the games really are, even during game playing scenes. The society itself, of which Gurgeh gets to see both the side presented to the world, and the darker underside, seems to only be based on gender definitions and the game. Culture itself isn’t really that different except that there doesn’t seem to be the dark scary-bad side.
Of the humans/biological characters, only Yay has much actual depth, and we only see them briefly at the beginning and at the end. Of the droids/drones/robots, Chamlis and Flere-Imsao seem to have a little character, but Chamlis is only present in the same sections as Yay. Then there’s the whole unrealizable narrator bit that starts and occasionally pauses the narrative just to remind you that the reader doesn’t know who they are, knows they are deliberately hiding their identity, and that’s about it. Mild suspense but easily forgettable, and not even all that suspenseful. It’s all about a bland as you can get without getting outright boring.