Book Review: MetaGame

MetaGame is a sci-fi book that looks at what happens when technology completely transforms society. When gaming completely transforms society. When medical advances completely transform society.

The book gets off to a pretty rough start. In this brave new world, there's a whole lot of culture, tech, and terminology to take in, and it's not exactly introduced gradually. It just kind of bombards you with all its slang and its oddities all at once. I imagine it's how my girlfriend feels about 0.3 seconds after I begin talking about work.

In this futuristic culture, science has found a cure for aging, greatly expanding the life expectancy of its people. Currency has been replaced by a simple, global point system. All of the jobs in the world have been restructured and redesigned as games, which is how folks earn their points. The individual religions of the populace have dissolved into one another; now there is only the belief in the OverSoul sets and enforces all of the rules for the game of Life.

Indeed, the amount of detail in this futuristic world is astounding. Chips are implanted so that people can interface with computers at the speed of thought. Indeed, they can even interface with each other at the speed of thought, kind of like Twitter on crack. People get small amounts of points for mentioning brand names in conversation, even more if the mention causes someone to buy said product. Which is kind of how some viral promotions on twitter work, or how this link works if you want to buy MetaGame. :P

The storyline is interesting; it's about one man's experience through a MetaGame, a very specific game run by the OverSoul himself. Apparently, it's something that happens every so often to the noble classes. I'm breezing over the story because, although it is a really good story, it doesn't captivate my imagination as much as the world it takes place in.

What irked me at first eventually came to be what I really liked about the setting. Each way we use technology, each advance, turns out to be not far off from the kinds of technology we have today.

And I, for one, can't wait until I can email folks from my brain.