The God Game

When I first got the ARC for this book, I was quite hype to get into it. I love playing video games almost as much as i love reading. Almost. So i was ready for this.

I debated hard about giving it 3.5 or 4 stars. The biggest reason being that I didn't really care about the teenaged crew of gamers. I didn't hate them and they didn't annoy me. I just didn't care. And for a book of roughly 500 pages I feel like maybe I should have cared about someone, anyone more. But I'll stick with 4 stars because the story had a great pace, and the suspense was there. At least for me it was. And I can't really say that it dragged anywhere for me. I would definitely love to see this turned into a tv show.

This book is probably a 3.5 for me. The premise is clever enough - an AI augmented reality game built to determine morality and test it and the acts that this leads a group of school kids to do as they become more immersed and addicted to the game. The ideas of what people can be persuaded to do is an interesting concept - the morality of the crowd is quite different to what is individually preached after all. Peer pressure can persuade people to do beastly things. The bulk of the books play around this theme is extremely clever and interesting.

Unfortunately it is let down in the end by a couple of bits of lazy story telling and an utterly unnecessary final chapter - the ambiguity left by missing out that chapter would probably have served the story much better than the final chapter does. This chapter falls very much into ‘and then they woke up' school of lazy endings. The chapter structure in the book is also slightly odd and jarring with extremely short chapters which are not necessarily forming natural breaks in the flow of the story - a slightly jarring thing to read.

However, other than this slightly jarring structure and one lazy storytelling trope in the final chapter the book is on the whole excellent. The theme is brilliantly realized, the prose easy to read, the characters interesting and the story reads in a very satisfying way. It could easily have been a 4 or 4.5 without the final chapter!

Solid Yet Could Have Been Transcendental. If you've seen the 2016 movie Nerve, you have a pretty good idea what you're getting into here. The two are very similar in overall concept, though ultimately both use the common concept to speak to different issues. With this particular book, you get more into The Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase's mantra - everyone has a price - even as the book tries in spits and spurts to discuss much weightier metaphysical topics. Hell, the book name drops Aquinas and Lewis and uses Thoth, Christ, Freud, and Heaphestus as characters! And while all of these add some interesting wrinkles to the overall tale, ultimately this book suffers from the same fate as Marcus Sakey's Afterlife. By this I mean that, as I said in the title, it is a solid action/ scifi book that could have been transcendental with a bit more care. Very much recommended.

Wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What a mind blowing roller coaster ride!

This book had me on the edge of my seat from start to finish. What was real what was the game?

What is the right decision to make? Is doing something bad to someone who has done something bad to help yourself or someone else ok?

Do you really die if you lose the game? Is it GOD or is it a computer?

I love this book and all its twists and turns.

And whose to say this couldn't actually be real....

Unlike anything I've ever read and surely not my typical genre. Kept hearing wonderful things about his title though so I just had to dive in and see what all the hype was about.

A group of teenage outcast friends known as The Vindicators are drawn into what seems to be a perfectly innocent video game at first until it becomes clear that what happens in the game, translates to real life. G.O.D., as it's known, starts to require more dangerous tasks to advance and things start to get highly questionable and flat out scary for this group. Every task seemed like a bigger test of morality... This was a thrilling and highly addictive read and I can't help but feel the comparison between the obsession with the game and our society's current social media/technology obsessions.

I was really interested in the story line of this book but the execution was painful. This book is SO SO slow. I listened to the 12.5 hr audio book. I bet 2 hours could have been cut to tighten it up. I finished it because I did want to find out the ending but I almost stopped several times. Cannot recommend.

So this book is much like the game in the plot. Meaningless, grasping at symbols and mythology to continually throw at the reader. Much like a horoscope, it throws it all out there hoping that whoever is reading will be able to derive some meaning from the drivel.

This book has one redeeming grace. The characters are deep and the relationships between them are nuanced. While they seem to flip between saints and villains often, often with no reason why. Most of what the characters do doesn't make sense, but at least they feel and you can feel what they feel. By chapter two you already care about the main character and his dead mom.

At the end of the day, this is a high school drama with broken and interesting characters. Random things happen and the book just kinda shrugs and says “it's random ai magic lol.”

As a computer engineer, who designs the systems in phones, the internet, wifi networks, laptops, etc this book angers me. It just kind of throws out technical babble that would have taken about an hour of talking to someone like myself to fix. Like the author just Googled some code tutorial and copy and pasted it. I get that putting in real code wouldn't be interesting to read and many of the “hacks” in this book aren't physically possible. But like for example, the car hacking. It briefly mentions the can bus, which is a real thing inside most cars for the US market. Then it mentions the data that is sent to the car. The hack is real, there are jeeps where you can hack the can bus through the navigation system but they certainly weren't made in 2010, the year of the car being hacked. Regardless, the data shows an eid, which should be an oid. The value of the eid was way too high (oids are like commands and they're numbered. They usually go up to a few thousand not several hundred thousand like it does in the book).

You could honestly take out the confusing “game” and replace it with an app that has similar privacy implications and misuse. The relationships between the characters is interesting and complex enough to drive the story. Jane austen did just fine with books solely about the interlacing of characters and the events that unfolded.