Gameplayers (1986), by Stephen Bowkett, was a super interesting novel. It was recommended to me, I believe, as a kind of outlier product of the moral panic around RPGs that inspired novels like Mazes & Monsters and Hobgoblin. I expected something dopey and sensationalized and featuring a really bizarre concept of how these games are played. It definitely delivers the latter, but that’s in the service of a surprisingly effective coming-of-age story about friendship, competition and knowing when to let go. The book is set among a pretty vividly rendered backdrop of English middle-school teen life circa 1985 and, while this isn’t the sort of novel I generally am interested in reading, I didn’t regret it. Can’t say the same for Mazes & Monsters and Hobgoblin.
John basically clings to his RPG session to distract him from the travails of a dull and disappointing real life. School bores him, his parents are on the verge of divorce and his sister is about to escape the house thanks to a looming engagement. Domestic violence hangs like a storm cloud. The mundane drama is periodically broken up by extended sequences in the fantasy world (some pretty thrilling, honestly — I love the giant, life draining monster that camouflages itself as a city and whose death throes cause earthquakes). And you think John is going to turn into the kid who gets himself lost in the game and have a mental breakdown, but nope, he is soon overshadowed by two of his fellow players, who treat the game like a proxy war. Their over-the-top behavior soon has John acting ever more reasonably. It’s an unusual set-up, but it all works, even if the climax (a brawl in a science lab that nearly turns literally explosive) seems slightly far-fetched. Worth the read, though, if you see it on the store shelf.
Funny thing: the game is like D&D, sort of, and we know that the GM is called the Routemaster, but I just skimmed through again and I am pretty certain now that the game itself is never named. I dig that.
