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Imagine all the hilariously stupid, infuriating and insane gaming anecdotes you’ve ever told and heard, put forward as the actual reality of what is transpiring in a fantasy world. Time, logic and reality become elastic as arguments over rules, narratives and personal grudges shift the events of the story to suit the whims of a highly dysfunctional and mismatched gaming group. The device Nexus uses for this is having two separate but interlaced stories going on, in two different fonts. The first is the story of six gods engaging in what we would recognise as a roleplaying game, although with metaphysical consequences and a flimsy mythological framework. The second is the story of the mortals that the gods move and control through the events the GM describes. As the gaming group sways in and out of sanity and miscellanea, so too the lives of their mortals sways in and out of strangeness and casual violence.
This transference is, as necessary, total, direct and immediate. For example, a discussion in the “OverRealm” about whether the fact that a god has not mentioned to the GM that his mortal has been going to the bathroom throughout the entire campaign implies that his mortal has not actually been going to the bathroom causes said mortal to immediately feel an incredible pressure on his bladder – for reasons he cannot explain or hope to understand – and said feeling vanishes the moment the argument ends.
That’s a simple and poor example that doesn’t really express the true potential of humour in what may seem like a simplistic or shallow idea. The question then is whether the book maximises this potential and taps into a deep comedy vein. The answer is: hell yes.
Game Night is gut-bustingly, rib-tearingly, bed-wettingly hilarious. It’s also sharply observed, cunningly crafted and decidedly well-written, but it’s the funny that leaves the impact.
Most humour books try to be novels-with-jokes, if you will. As such, aren’t as funny as say, sketch comedies which are simply a series of great jokes run together. The last novel I read that was devoted to just being a string of comedy sketches was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (taken of course, from a radio show that was a series of sketches run together). Hitchhikers was, as a result, the funniest novel I’ve ever read, and the only one that has ever made laugh out-loud. Until, that is, Game Night came along.
This is one of those books you cannot read in a crowded space because having to constantly breaking into spontaneous guffaws looks unseemly, if not unbalanced. So does having to get up and wipe your eyes, not to mention falling off the couch because you were laughing so hard. The last indeed may cause your significant other to stare witheringly at you for quite some time, while the laughter may lead to permanent and disabling injury. There should probably be a warning label on this book, something like Warning: May Cause Cohabitors to Brain You With Cooking Utensils Because You Can’t Stop Giggling Like A Hyperactive Schoolgirl.
Game Night is funnier than anything has a right to be. It is one of the funniest things ever written about gaming, and gaming is already pretty freaking hilarious, putting this work head and shoulders over almost every other humour novel on the market. If you have any contact with gaming and any kind of funny bone, you must pick this up.
That’s the review for the general public. Now, for the gamers in the audience (there must be some of you out there), a little bit more depth on the nature of the satire. Our players at the gaming table in this tome are the AllFather, the Warrior, the Dealer, the Lady, the Jester and the Sleeper. We’ll take them one at a time.
The AllFather is the classic long-suffering yet wildly egocentric GM. Of all of them, he is perhaps the most frustratingly idiotic, and I so often desperately wanted to slap him for his crimes against gaming. Then again, that might be because the GM is my favoured role at the table, so this became a very personal issue. Still, it was impressive that Nexus didn’t fall into the trap of making the GM infallible or even righteous in his despair at his players. This particular GM borrows extensively from the classic playbook of mistakes, from railroading to pixelbitching to grudge monsters to relentless puzzle design. He has the classic GM narcissism towards his precious world and plot arc which means the reader can only take joy in watching it totally unravel when it comes into contact with the indomitably chaotic, disrespectful and self-interested PCs.
Which isn’t to say you don’t wince when his players are relentlessly stupid and atagonistic, or that his world design is entirely without merit. Beneath his ego is a quite decent GM with some great sparks of creativity. Nexus works hard to give all the gods/players admirable qualities, as well as a central, loveable humanity. This makes them more than just punchlines, and stops the novel from benig just a series of one-note jokes. So it is that the more you laugh at them, the more you come to love them.
The Warrior is the classic example. He represents both the power-gamer and the buttkicker at the table. For him, the only solution is combat and discussing any other solution is wasting time. In order to ensure he wins these combats, he is playing a tricked-out min-maxed paladin, serving an evil necromantic god to avoid debuffs due to immoral acts. Yet there is something increasingly endearing about his insistence on killing everything in sight no matter how much it will hinder his own success, his assuredness that being dead is only a minor setback in one’s career, and his refusal to ever remove his pitch-black armour and eleven magic rings (hint: the eleventh one isn’t on his toes).
Equally endearing is The Jester, the player who plays solely to make fun of his fellows. He’s playing a Halfling thief, and is naturally devoted to stealing everything not nailed down. Unlike the Warrior, the Jester is less interested in mindlessly destroying the campaign, but he is equally anti-social and equally dedicated to his own character’s desires, over and above any other concern whatsoever. Having spent much of my gaming history swinging between the Warrior and the Jester, there was much here for me to relish and relive, but even if you haven’t, these two are a hilarious double act. Meanwhile, the times when the Jester stops jesting and starts kicking ass drive the plot forward, and his increasing menagerie of animal companions provides for much of the book’s sweet-natured humour.
The Dealer is confusingly named. I believe it is because everything to him is a Big Deal. He’s a method actor and a setting purist; to him the only concern must be preserving his character’s motivations and the fidelity of the world around him. For The Dealer, out of character knowledge is the greatest sin, and diverging from the holy quest the PCs are given the greatest folly. This makes him the perfect straight man for the Warrior and the Jester, who care nothing for either character knowledge or setting fidelity, and whose constant tangents drive the Dealer to distraction. Again though, you feel no sorrow for him being shouted down because he’s a whiny git with no care for anyone else’s needs, least of all the poor AllFather trying to hold the group together. He’s redeemed because his character is actually awesome and he plays it well, providing the sole sense of meaning to the campaign and thus the story of the mortals.
The Lady is also – if you’ll forgive the expression - a straight-man, existing primarily to be offended by the Warrior, frustrated by the Jester and blocked by the Dealer. She is a reference perhaps to the all-patient female gamer but far more the former than the latter. That is, beyond a few brief gender issues jokes, she is much more the peacemaker than the lady. Of course, often the peacemaker and plot-advancer at the table is the female, reigning in the raging testosterone of her fellows, so this doesn’t feel forced. Meanwhile it saves Nexus from trying to fit in a “feminazi” or “queen bee” archetype, an exercise which could have gone horribly, horribly wrong. The Lady instead is the heart of the game table, the only one who actually understands that everyone is there to have fun, which provides the central meaning to the story being told about the game. Because of the Dealer, we care about the story being told; because of the Lady we care about the tellers.
Lastly we have the Sleeper, who represents the “social gamer” who doesn’t know or really care what’s going on but is nevertheless present. Or mostly present. If you nudge him. At first, I worried that the Sleeper added little to the five but his constant vagueness provides a regular stream of very solid gags, and I was surprised how many memories of my high-school games he brought back. And once again, you grow to love even the semi-presence of this unshakeable, inscrutable ally.
And that, in the end, is the heart of the book - and the heart of roleplaying. For all their strangeness, all their selfishness and all their stupidity, we can’t help but love our characters. Eventually, we even love our friends’ characters, and our GM’s campaign. We might even love our friends. Despite it all, at the end of the night, it was somehow all worth it. And that’s the feeling we’re left with at the end of the book: that there was, underneath all the humour and arguing, a decent story being told here, where great heroes risked their lives to achieve great things, in a setting not entirely devoid of wonder and epic scope. You are left with the sensation – just as I was when I left my less functional gaming groups - of never wanting to play with the players again, yet sharing fond memories of the trials and triumphs your characters went through together.
And that’s why Game Night is so great. Above and beyond its relentless hilarity, it captures not just the inherent humanity of the players but also the inherent wonder and the sheer childlike fun of the hobby. For all its savage lampooning, this remains a parody full of love, and it makes me want to game. Not with the players described, of course, but if games so horribly dysfunctional can be this awesome, how much more fun can be had when things are far more aligned? And can I get some friends together on Saturday and find out?
Game Night, in short, leaves us hungry for another. Same time next week, please Mr Nexus? I’ll bring the cheetos!
Style: 5 Substance: 5
