47 pages • 1 hour read
Monica HughesInvitation To The Game
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “17 June, 2154. Bread and Circuses”
Lisse and her group of friends follow the instructions on their invitations to The Game, taking a subway train to the Barton Oaks station. While on the train, they meet another group of unemployed people who are also going to The Game. They ask a girl in the other group what to expect from The Game, but she only tells them, “Each group’s experience is unique. And private” (59).
When they reach the station, Lisse’s group enters a room where a robot greets them. The teens change into “identical greenish-gray” coveralls (61) and boots. A man who seems to run The Game asks the teens to guess what The Game is based on their historical knowledge. Lisse suggests The Game is like the Roman gladiator games, repeating Charlie’s earlier comparison. The man instead says The Game is more like 20th-century “war games” such as paintball, football, or laser tag, but he tells them that, unlike the individualistic games of the past, The Game is “a cooperative venture” (62) in which the players search for clues.
He instructs the teens to lie down on hypnotic chairs that lull them into a hypnotic state. They wake up in a vast desert. Although they are in a hypnotic state, they are still able to feel all their senses. They see a prominent mesa and decide to investigate it. While climbing up the mesa, Lisse cuts her hand on the rockface and almost falls, but her friends catch her. When they reach the top of the cliff, the teens observe the view and note the features of the landscape. They decide to head for a lake so they can find water. As they are climbing down, Lisse falls off the cliff. She feels no pain when she lands; she just sees blackness.
Chapter 4 Summary: “July 2154. The Treasure Seekers”
Lisse wakes up in the same chair where she was hypnotized expecting to have injuries from her fall, but there are no physical effects from her experience. She and her friends take the subway back home. While on the train, Lisse sees a newspaper headline that reads, “CONGRESSMAN CALLS FOR STERILIZATION OF THE UNEMPLOYED” (72). Thinking of past examples of genocide, she grows panicked imagining how she and other unemployed people could be murdered en masse.
When they get home, the teens compare their memories of their experience in The Game, concluding they all shared the same vision. The teens physically train in preparation for the next round of The Game. A month passes before they receive another invitation to The Game.
The teens attempt to bring supplies with them into the game, including water and medical kits, and they plan to head straight for the lake. They go to the same station as before and fall asleep in the same hypnotic chairs. When they wake, they find themselves close to the lake, and they wonder if The Game is anticipating their objectives. They discover the lake is filled with salt water that is unsafe to drink. Lisse tastes the water, and it burns her tongue. When she looks for the supplies she brought with her, including her water, they are gone. She and the others guess that they cannot transport anything into The Game from real life. When their thirst grows too intense, they awaken in their chairs in the station.
Soon, they are invited back for a third visit. Before they start The Game, they ask the manager of The Game if they can bring items to help them. Instead of directly saying no, he tells them it is not allowed because it would give them an unfair advantage.
During their third round, they walk along a riverbed that has undisturbed copper, which they take as a sign that they are in an uninhabited area. Katie tries eating kernels of grass and suffers no ill effects. Then Paul tries some berries, causing the group to awaken back in the station. They determine the berries must have been poisonous because their round of The Game only ends if one of them is in danger.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
These chapters depict how The Game provides the teens with a new sense of purpose, returning to the theme of finding meaning in life. Once the teens have participated in The Game, they begin to view it as their main reason for existence. Lisse describes their obsession with The Game: “Whatever The Game was, it had sucked us in. We were totally committed to it. We breathed, we talked The Game” (83).
Their fascination with The Game reinforces the theory that The Game’s goal is to distract the unemployed from their undesirable living conditions. This theory resurfaces when the teens discuss The Game with The Game Manager. When the Game manager asks what they believe The Game is about, Lisse says, “Bread and circuses” (62), referring to the comparison Charlie made between The Game and the Roman gladiatorial games.
However, The Game Manager’s explanation of The Game differs from Charlie’s. His own analogy comparing The Games to military exercises reveals that The Game is not created to entertain the unemployed but to test their skills. The teens discover in later chapters that The Game is, in fact, a competition between groups of unemployed people for the reward of moving to a new planet, revealing the Game Manager’s description of the Game in Chapter 3 as accurate.
The Game Manager’s assertion that the “war games of the late twentieth century” were “violent” and “ego-centered” (62) allows the novel to directly comment on the period in which it waw written: the 1990s. By stressing the need for cooperation in The Game, the Game Manager highlights another important theme: the importance of collectivism. Hughes portrays collectivism as preferable to individualism by showing the value of cooperation in The Game. The teens are more successful when they work together, and ultimately the reason they survive and thrive on another planet is due to their collaboration.
While the teens view The Game in a positive, uncritical light, their interactions with employed people on the subway train calls attention to Lisse and her friends’ status as a marginalized people living in an authoritarian society. Employed people deride them in public, but they have no way of fighting back against these insults for fear of being jailed or sent to a mental health institution. Furthermore, the newspaper headline advocating for sterilization of the unemployed alludes to the eugenics movement in The United States and in Germany, where it was posited that certain factions should be forcibly prevented from reproducing. Lisse’s allusion to The Holocaust remind the reader that othering a whole group of people can start a chain of events leading to genocide.
Technology continues to play an important role in these chapters, since the teens are only able to access the virtual reality simulation of The Game through advanced technology. The Game resembles an advanced version of a video game, since the teens explore its world and interact with its features to find clues that lead to a reward. Lisse often employs the language of video games when discussing The Game. For example, when she first arrives in the Barton Oaks station and finds the room of empty chairs, she states, “What had I expected? Something bright and garish, I think, like a video arcade” (60).
Meanwhile, The Game Manager uses the language of scientific experimentation when discussing The Game. When the teens ask him if they can bring items into The Game, he refuses because it would “upset the balance, skew the success-probability” (84). He views the players of The Game as participants in an experiment, and he doesn’t want the results to be tampered with.
Finally, these chapters establish the world of The Game as one ripe for colonization. The teens speculate that the landscape they encounter in The Game is in Africa or China, exotic locales from a North American perspective. By mentioning places that Western countries have colonized in past eras, and by emphasizing The Game Manager’s scientific language, the novel foreshadows colonization of a new planet as the goal of The Game.
