The God Game

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!