Constellation Games

What kinds of videogames would aliens make? Maybe I'm simply unaware of it, but I'm pretty sure this topic has never been tackled by science fiction before. In Constellation Games, humanity makes contact with the Constellation, a Star Trek-esque conglomeration of alien species working together in a post-scarcity society. The first thought of the government is that it's an invasion. The first thought of Ariel Blum, a freelance computer programmer who mostly works on a series of Brazilian games about ponies for girls, is that he wants to review the aliens' games on his blog.

Constellation Games alternates between Ariel's blog and straight first-person narration from Ariel, with chat conversations and letters and such interspersed. The Constellation takes a multifaceted approach to their contact with Earth, and so Ariel soon finds himself in possession of a replica of a millions-of-years-old Constellation gaming console, along with tons of games. It's a short hop from the idea of reviewing a game to porting one; he wants to help his fellow human understand aliens by releasing one of their games.

Without a doubt, the best parts of Constellation Games are the game reviews. There are several alien species in the Constellation and we not only see games for multiple species, but games that one of those species made off another, and yet Richardson never fails to communicate the alien nature of the games while still making them seem like plausible games. I loved these sections: the game Sayable Spice, where the player collects components of taste molecules, comes up a lot, but Blum (and Richardson) show how a good game doesn't just have an interesting mechanic; it can say something, too. There's one bit where Ariel plays a game called Gatekeeper where you guard the boundary between life and death, "let[ting] normal traffic through, while flicking away dead people who shouldn't be living (zombies) and living people who shouldn't be dying (suicides?)" (33). Ariel's alien contact, Curic, sends him a message to dispute that they are not zombies, they're people who "want a refund." Ariel says that's the same thing, and she replies:

Curic: Zombies are fully dead people who come back to life for no reason.
What you are seeing is when one half of a person dies, the other half wants a refund.
Otherwise the entire person will die in a few hours.
ABlum: who gives out the refunds?
Curic: There are no refunds.
That's the point of the game. (35)

A whole alien biology and culture, expressed via inscrutable game mechanics!

Even aside from that, it's a surprisingly good novel. I guess I was expecting something like Taft 2012, the last high-concept sf novel I read, but Richardson gives Blum a strong narrative voice, that while idiosyncratic, never grates, and surrounds him with characters that perhaps initially seem stereotypical, but soon begin to betray extra levels of depth, both human and alien. Tetsuo Milk, the alien paleontologist who eventually becomes a history lecturer at the University of Texas, was probably my favorite, and the transcript of his first lecture is amazing. There are even some bits that approach being genuinely moving. It's also funny at times-- you can't underestimate the importance of that! The Constellation are a well fleshed out group of aliens, who avoid feeling too stereotypical in their types of social interactions (I loved the idea of "overlays").

At 357 pages, the plot meanders a bit. The back cover and some early passages imply there's a conspiracy to uncover, but that turns out to not be true at all; the plot is much more character focused. As such, the book ends the way that people's experiences actually end: frustratingly open-ended. What happens to Ariel and his friends next? I find myself wanting to know, but I'm not dissatisfied with the way the book ended; it came to the exact right spot.

Constellation Games is a love letter to videogames and certain elements of geek culture, that's for sure, but it's not a polemic; it shows both the marvelous possibilities of gaming, but also how it often fails to achieve its full potential-- and why. It's an engaging, original way to explore an alien society, but also ourselves, like all the best science fiction should. I rocketed through it (often drawn into a chapter on the basis of just reading that next game review), and I'd happily read more sf by Richardson should he choose to write it.

Constellation Games by Leonard Richardson, reviewed from an Advance Reading Copy received through the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program.

What an odd book! I liked it, although I am neither a video gamer nor interested in gaming. Loved the idea of a guy who sees first contact as an opportunity for translating alien games so that they can be played on human computers (and vice versa!), and the whole mish-mash of politics, conspiracy, anthropology, etc. rang true. The story might have been a bit slow - didn't exactly grab me and make me want to blow off the rest of the world while I finished it, but it was good and I recommend it.

I'm not interested in gaming and I'm way older than the author and what I think are the intended readers. I wasn't sure I would like this book.

Well, the heck with that. I do like it.

Ariel Blum is a game developer whose career and relationships are going nowhere. To cap it all, aliens arrive and start carving up the moon. The Constellation, some kind of confederation of star-travelling species.

Ariel, being a complete nerd, is mainly interested in the fact that the aliens also play computer games. He applies to review their games for humans.

The aliens drop-shop some millions-of-years-old tech, and he is off and running. Through various mishaps and misadventures, including Men In Black, he accrues friends and experience points, with no clear goal in mind except to start his own gaming company.

It is not clear to me if Ariel knows what he is doing, or if he is just reacting instinctively or keeping to his anarchist roots. His actions are anti-authoritarian but he does not articulate a consistent anarchist ideology (good for the author: that would be boring).

What philosophy there is in the book is supplemented with lots of nerd humor and subplots about immigration officials, a virtual girlfriend, physical girlfriends, and metafractal reduction (matter hacking).

This book cries out for a sequel. Well, no, it does not, but I do.

To any authoritarians who might read this book: K'chua! ( )

Yes, the cover is ugly – an amateurish looking bunch of buttons with alien symbols on them on a sickly sage green background. (Seemingly more blue, though, in the actual published version judging by the publisher’s website.)

Yes, the subtitle, “a space opera soap opera”, is too cute and misleading for what the book is.

Yes, the cover description is professionally done but doesn’t inspire one with confidence as to whether the book will really deliver on its promise. Frankly, I wouldn’t have bought this book myself.

But this is a good book. It’s a funny book and an inventive one.

Narrator Ariel Blum is an acid tongued, sarcastic narrator – not normally the kind I like to spend time with, but I’ll grant he’s realistic, and I liked all the programming and engineering jargon he laced his speech with. When aliens show up and begin mining the moon for materials to build a space station, he has the insight that if the aliens have computers they have computer games. And Ariel knows his computer games. As a game programmer and obsessive game reviewer, he wants to study alien videogames.

What he finds out in those games about alien cultures, biologies, environments, and the effect of first contact with the alien coalition known as the Constellation is the most inventive part of this story. Apart from Ian Banks’ The Player of Games and Fritz Leiber’s “Knight to Move”, I’m not personally acquainted with any stories that use games to expose elements of alien culture (and the Science Fiction Encylopedia seems to confirm this). That aliens would indeed have videogames now seems, at this point in our technological development, obvious, but only Richardson seems to have done anything significant with it.

Helping Blum is Curic, an alien whose bicameral mind has enrolled her in two conspiracies as to what to do with humans now that contact has been made. The problem is that most Constellation alien contacts find fossilized civilizations, long gone by the time the Constellation gets there. And, for the few they find alive, culture shock is a problem, and there are other threats to both human and alien cultures.

Besides Curic, Blum strikes a friendship up with the alien anthropologist Tetsuo who teaches him about alien videogames and insists, with frequently bizarre results, on teaching human college courses. His mate, Ashley, an alien paleontologist, is not sure what to do about his enthusiasms.

On the human side, there is Blum’s friend Jenny and why she is not his girlfriend, given the nature of their relationship, is unclear until the end. Blum’s friend Bai does have a girlfriend – a virtual one who resides on his phone. And Blum, after making contact on his own with the aliens, comes to the unwelcome attention of two agents of the newly organized Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs.

There is plenty of room for humor with cultural misunderstandings, alien-human interaction, and bizarre personal obsessions. But it isn’t a frivolous, light read. The story, told in a combination of first-person narration, blog posts, e-mails, and text messages, gets complicated. One peculiarity is that, while Blum makes some insightful comments on the attraction of human videogames, he does not, as far as I can tell, name a single real one though this story is set in the very near future. And you do have to pay attention to the various alien factions and games.

And the end is surprisingly moving as something is said about the nature of love and its place in an uncaring universe.

Don’t let the packaging put you off on this one. It’s worth reading. ( )

Here's a fine story of first contact with an advanced, thriving, and pacific alien civilization. It occurs in the relatively near future where we're still stuck on Earth with no solution in sight to our impending global crisis of overpopulation, resource grabbing, nation warring, and bogus space program support. It's narrated mostly from the perspective of a video games programmer/enthusiast using standard prose, game reviews, blog posts, email, and other forms of communication tools. I gather I am the target demographic, since I thoroughly enjoyed the humor and the romance and the social politics in addition to the geek culture infused in the work.

This author's first published novel contains all the goodies: original and creative ideas, general sensawunda, interesting and surprising characters, and production of that gut-wrenching fear that you feel when you realize the story will eventually have to end. Bonus: the aliens are alien.

Pick this up. Don't let the format bother you. This ride will take you to a lot of places that only Leonard Richardson has dreamed, and if you find that maybe none of them are where you would want to end up, we all know it's about the journey, natch! ( )