Page "The Player of Games" Paragraph 10

In the empire, the game is the main determinant of one's social status.

The game is played in a tournament every " Great Year " ( roughly every six Culture years ), initially consisting of some 12, 000 players in the main series.

Through the various rounds, these are all whittled down until the final game, the victor of which becomes emperor.

Players knocked out from the main series may take part in further games to determine their careers.

The complexity of the game aims to represent reality to such a degree that a player's own political and philosophical outlook can be expressed in play ( the idea being that rival ideologies are essentially " tested " in the game before the winners can apply them in reality ).

As the protagonist discovers, the game embodies the incumbent preferences of the social elite, reinforcing and reiterating the pre-existing gender and caste inclinations of the empire, putting the lie to the " fairness " which is generally perceived to govern the outcome of the tournament and thus the shape of Azadian society.

In the novel, the protagonist ultimately finds that his ( successful ) tactics reflect the values of his own civilization, the Culture, though he also recognises that his own thought and behaviour have been markedly influenced by the manner in which he has been forced to compete.

In a private audience with the emperor on the penultimate eve of the tournament, when confronted with the seeming absurdity of the possibility that a novice with a mere two years of experience at the game could systematically defeat players ' whose whole lives were devoted to its mastery, the protagonist comes to understand that his proficiency is merely a reflection of his experience with strategic games of all sorts.

Given that, the Culture had intended all along to use him to discredit the brutality of the Azadian system by publicly giving the lie to the game's representation of social reality.