Dreamland

(Just a quick reminder to leave me a suggestion on my birthday blog contest post for a list of thirteen things you’d like to see, and I’ll enter your name for my contests!)

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So, for today’s reading update we have an older book, but one that perhaps makes more sense now than it did when it was written. The book is 1981’s DREAM PARK by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes. Wiki has some information on the book here.

Essentially, what this book does, is foreshadow LARPing. (Only way cooler, with hologram swords and enemies that are both played by actors and created by holograms. Also with neat effects for magic spells.) If you are a gamer, and you read this book, you will wonder what it would be like to play there. Guaranteed. Who wouldn’t want a chance to try that? To become your character for a few days in a socially-acceptable (or mostly acceptable) Game?

Until there’s a murder, anyway. Then things get tricky.

Now, there were two disappointments for me. One, was no fault of the authors. The jacket blurb makes it sound like the murder is inside the Game, and that when your character gets killed, the player gets killed too. (What actually happens when a character dies, if the clerics are unable to revive the character, a ghost appears to lead the player to an exit where he can watch the rest of the Game on a viewscreen.) This would make a really cool motivation to stay alive in the Game, and it’s what I thought I was getting into. Instead, however, there is a murder outside of the Game itself, and the main character is a security chief who goes into the Game in order to solve the murder. (A very good plot, just not what I thought I was getting.)

The second disappointment was in the ultimate conclusion. I like the way the plot resolved, there were just issues with the character resolution – that I can’t go into without spoilers, and I won’t do that – which didn’t sit right with me. It’s possible that this is a product of the era in which it was written, or the fact that it was written by men (which sometimes seems to make a difference) but it just wasn’t concluded the way I would have done it.

Anyway. It’s a highly amusing story, and I do recommend that anyone who plays role-playing games read it. If you can find it…