Invitation To The Game

“As everyone exclaimed, I remembered my readout…‘Enjoy your leisure years. Use them creatively.’ […] Forty years in this jungle? I felt unbearably helpless. Was that why those kids painted their faces and rampaged through the city, breaking windows and carrying off women? Because violence was better than forty years of nothing? Even at the risk of being caught by the thought police?” 

The contrast between The Government’s empty slogan for the unemployed and the harsh reality of living in the city highlights Lisse’s lack of control over her future. Despite The Government’s surveillance, the city is a “jungle” filled with crime and anarchy. Lisse theorizes that the cause of the violence is the lack of work, not because people don’t have enough to sustain themselves (since The Government provides the unemployed with their basic needs) but because people have no meaning in their lives.

“‘Electronic?’ she mocked. ‘Who do you think you are? You’re living rent free. The monthly credits you collect here will buy you food and cleaning supplies and that’s it. Damned generous too, if you ask me. It’s our taxes you unemployed are living off, you know.’” 

The employed workers, such as the receptionist at the rehab center who laughs at the teens’ request for technology, resent the unemployed because they don’t have to work, and The Government provides for their food and shelter. The receptionist’s attitude reveals the social hierarchy of Lisse’s world in which the unemployed are treated as second-class citizens and viewed as burdens to those who pay taxes. The irony is that the unemployed are not lazy; there are simply no jobs available for them. Here, Hughes speaks to unfair contemporary societal perspectives.

“It always seemed odd to me that our life expectancy should go down when there was no poverty and no tension about having to earn a living. Maybe boredom was aging.” 

The novel emphasizes the negative psychological consequences of unemployment. It asserts that even when the unemployed have their needs met, their lack of purpose still affects their well-being, causing them to turn to drugs and crime. However, at the end of the novel, the teens surmise that one of the reasons life expectancies decline is because The Government is sending unemployed people to a new planet while officially counting them as deceased, suggesting that the future for unemployed people overall is not as bleak as it first appears.

“[The Game is] boring stuff compared to what I have to offer. It’s a propaganda tool of the thought police to keep the unemployed masses amused that’s all. […] They make it difficult for you to take part in it. So if you do get in, you feel like you’ve won.” 

Charlie, the gang leader, asserts that the true purpose behind The Game is to manipulate the unemployed through entertainment, making the people who are chosen for The Game feel special. While the teens later debunk Charlie’s theory, his ideas foreshadow The Game’s psychological effect on the teens. It does give them a sense of purpose that replaces their need for a job, and they do feel chosen, especially once they arrive on the new planet and realize they have proven themselves worthy of emigration there.

“Computers were information. Information was power. No government would leave that kind of power in the hands of the unemployed, we knew that. This was why we lived close to the library, why we had real bound books. The past we were permitted. It was only from the future we were cut off.”

Lisse and her companions show awareness of their marginalized position and attempt to use what little agency they have to control their lives, but they are only allowed to read books, not use computers. The Government’s refusal to allow the unemployed to access technology reveals that it views the unemployed underclass as an existential threat to its existence. By tightly controlling their access to information, The Government precludes the possibility that the unemployed will organize to overthrow the unjust system.

“The people back in those days were highly competitive and warlike. In spite of being fully employed, they still had aggressive impulses that had to be channeled into physical contact sports and later into video games, and, ultimately, into the live war game. […] Of course, no one in today’s society would want to participate in such a violent ego-centered competition. The Game, as we have refined it to suit the needs of today, is a cooperative venture.” 

The Game Manager’s description of the people of the late 20th century (the period from which Hughes writes the novel) critiques the bellicose culture of the post-WWII era. The novel’s idealistic portrayal of cooperation as a solution to societal problems contrasts with the individualism and competitiveness of capitalism. While the Game Manager describes the video games of this period as an inspiration for The Game, he emphasizes the ideological contrast between games of that period and The Game.

“If we didn’t exist, their tax money wouldn’t have to pay for our basic shelter and food, I realized. Sterilization might only be the beginning. Perhaps, if they got their way, the workers would eliminate us entirely, like the Jews and the Catholics and Gypsies who went to the gas chambers in the dark ages of the twentieth century.”

After seeing a headline that advocated for the forced sterilization of the unemployed, Lisse predicts even worse events will follow. Lisse’s allusion to The Holocaust may seem hyperbolic, but her alarm indicates her awareness of the process that leads to genocide. She understands that the hatred that the employed people hold for the unemployed could escalate into mass violence.

“‘Maybe we shouldn’t question it too much. Perhaps The Game is like a soap bubble. If you poke it to see what the rainbows are made of, it bursts and you have nothing.’ Scylla understood what I felt.” 

Scylla’s comparison of The Game to an insubstantial bubble underscores the fragility of the teens’ belief in The Game. It seems too good to be true, a heavenly vision, but Lisse and Scylla do not want to become disillusioned with it yet because it is providing them with a reason to live. Lisse and Scylla realize they may be deluding themselves, but they also prefer self-delusion to thinking The Game is meaningless.

“This time there were no arguments. Whatever The Game was, it had sucked us in. We were totally committed to it. We breathed, we talked The Game […] The Game had become our life. Everything we did sprang from some need in The Game. Sometimes I wondered what would happen to us if we never got another invitation.”

The Game evolves into a stand-in for religion to the teens. They view it as their main purpose in life, and they structure their life around its demands, treating it with the same fervor as piety. However, The Game does not provide them with self-actualization because they depend on it completely for meaning, and if they were to lose it, they would not be able to cope.

“‘The archbishop is asleep and dreaming of a grasshopper that is sitting on his chest,’ he said. ‘Or is he? Perhaps it is the grasshopper who dreams that it is sitting on the chest of a sleeping archbishop. Which of them is real? The archbishop? Or the grasshopper?’”

Paul’s parable about the archbishop and the grasshopper suggests that reality is relative since it all depends on one’s perspective. His words, which Lisse agrees with, suggest that it doesn’t really matter whether The Game is real, as long as it fulfills the teens’ need for meaning in life. Ironically, the blurring of reality and fantasy becomes literal when the teens later discover that the initial stages of The Game were, in fact, a simulation designed to prepare them for colonizing a new planet.

“Home was just around the corner when we heard the clatter of helicopter blades overhead. The thought police. Instinctively we crouched in the shadow of a warehouse wall. My skin prickled and I wondered why I felt guilty? Surely we’d done nothing wrong? We were in our own DA and the mattress we were carrying had been honestly scrounged. But I had that rat-in-a-maze feeling again. All I wanted to do was find a hole and hide in it.” 

Lisse compares herself and her friends to rodents burrowing into the ground to hide from predators. By depicting herself as prey and the Thought Police as predators, she implies that she feels targeted by The Government simply for being unemployed. This stereotyping has the effect of reinforcing the feeling that she is guilty even when she has not committed any crimes. This moment emphasizes the unemployed group’s low social standing.

“Dust fanned up by the helicopter blades swirled around our feet. Dust and stray pieces of paper. DOWN WITH THE GOVERNMENT. WORK FOR THE UNEMPLOYED. They were printed in the blotched letters of some underground protest group’s homemade press. We trampled them into the dirt.” 

The leaflets from a revolutionary organization indicate that there is a subversive group plotting a rebellion. Lisse and her friends have no interest in joining this revolt and take pains to distance themselves from it by destroying evidence of its existence. They agree with the group’s aims, but they fear backlash from The Government.

“‘But what power!’ Karen exclaimed. ‘The Game must be far more important than bread and circuses in order for The Government to move people from place to place as if they were pieces in a mysterious game of chess.’” 

Karen’s mention of “bread and circuses” alludes to the teen’s earlier discussion of The Game as a governmental plot to appease the masses like the gladiatorial games of Rome. However, she points out that The Government’s manipulation of Benta and Rich’s employment status to force them to join The Game reveals that The Game must have a deeper purpose than just simple entertainment. Her comment foreshadows the revelation that The Game’s true purpose is to export the excess unemployed population to colonies on a new planet. Furthermore, her comparison of the teens to “pieces in a mysterious game of chess” highlights the lack of agency the teens have to control anything around them.

“Into my mind flashed a couplet from a nineteenth century poem I had found in the library. How did it go? ‘Beware, beware…something, something…for he on honeydew has fed and drunk the milk of Paradise.’” 

This allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” signifies that Lisse is worried that The Game might be a fantasy that is too good to be true. In the poem, the speaker falls asleep after taking opium and dreams of a fantastical land that is both heavenly and dangerous. The couplets hint at the possibility that The Game might not be real, while also foreshadowing the existence of a true paradise, the new planet where Lisse and her companions will settle.

“Brad pulled me away and held me tight until I stopped crying. A year ago, that would have been comfort enough. Now it was meaningless. All I could think of was a maze with us running back and forth and a great eye watching us from above.” 

Lisse’s reaction to Brad comforting her reveals her character development: when she was in school, she was attracted to Brad. Now that she lives in the city, she is no longer interested in him romantically and finds the idea of romance pointless. Describing the anxiety that she feels at being surveilled by the government as the feelings of being a rat running in a maze, she shows how The Government’s constant interference in her life not only scares her, but it also causes her existential anguish.

“I ran through everything that the Manager had told us. He’d talked about arcade games, video games….I remembered Brad’s achievements with computer games when we were kids at school, exploring the rooms of castles and dungeons, each booby-trapped in more ingenious ways, each crowded with opponents of ever-increasing strength and subtlety. Increasing subtlety. That was it!” 

Lisse theorizes that The Game has levels like a video game because the experience of The Game grows more challenging for her and her group. They do not realize yet that the prior stage of The Game was a simulation, and the reason the newest iteration of The Game feels so difficult is that they have actually moved to a new planet. While her belief that they are in a video game turns out to be incorrect, her analogy of viewing their new experience as higher level of The Game is true, in a sense, because the Government deemed them worthy of progressing from the simulation to reality. 

“Suppose one of the pamphlet-printing groups had actually brought off a revolution? […] Perhaps our wired-up bodies were right now lying helpless on the gray couches in the gray room behind the secret door. Perhaps they would lie there till they rotted. What would become of the essential us then? Would we vanish, and this imaginary land with us?” 

Lisse contemplates the possibility that the reason they are stuck in The Game is because a revolution has occurred back home. While she and her group fear The Government and dislike its rules, her worry that a revolt at home might place her in jeopardy shows how aware she is of her and her friends’ dependency on The Government. While they don’t like its control, they accept its power over their lives. Furthermore, by mentioning the possibility that she has died on Earth, the novel hints that the world she now inhabits is a metaphorical afterlife, or a place where Lisse has been reborn.

“Suddenly the scenario changes. Your escape from reality is no longer attractive. You are wet, cold, and hungry. You begin to long for the amenities of the city which, just a short time ago, you were happy to escape. Aversion theory. Come on, all of you admit it…you’d be thankful to find yourself back there, wouldn’t you? In spite of the dirt, the crowding, the lack of freedom?” 

Rich proposes his own theory that the new challenges they experience in The Game are part of a government plot to brainwash the unemployed into feeling grateful for what they do have. He depicts The Government as psychologically abusive. While Rich theory’s is mistaken, his characterization of The Government as manipulative is accurate.

“Trent’s raised fists brought home the awful reality to us, even more than the sight of our galaxy had done. This was forever. Nobody had landed with us, helped us set up shelter, given us supplies, promised to come back in a year or so before shaking our hands and leaving. Nobody had done that. We had been thrown off Earth, dropped with nothing but our wits and our will to live. Abandoned on an alien world. Forever. And ever.” 

Lisse’s repetition of the words “nobody” and “forever” reveal the depth of her distress upon realizing that The Government has left her and her group alone on a new planet. By emphasizing that “nobody” is there to help them, she reveals that despite her animosity towards The Government, she feels lost without its presence. She also feels betrayed, since she and her friends put their trust in The Government, playing The Game and acting like model unemployed citizens rather than rebelling.

“One day out of a lifetime of days. The thought was no longer terrifying but comforting. This was a world of infinite possibilities and we had hardly scratched the surface.” 

By viewing life on a new planet as an opportunity rather than a tragedy, Lisse changes her mind set to cope with the disturbing reality that she is stuck on a new world for the rest of her life. She chooses to view her new home as a vast place to explore. This positive reframing allows Lisse to regain a sense of control over her life.

“We had played The Game and the prize was in our hands. What a prize! A whole world, new and unspoiled, like a landscape directly after a snowfall, before the footprints and the wheel ruts, the thaw and the mud. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to make sure that we didn’t mess up this planet the way humans had ruined the Earth.”

The novel depicts the teens’ life on the new planet as a reward for their performance during The Game. The Government has deemed the teens as worthy of colonizing the new world, like how in Christianity God chooses who is worthy of ascending to heaven. Furthermore, the pure, untouched nature of the new planet suggests it is an allusion to the Garden of Eden before the original sin.

“I am always amazed that, no matter what we make or how laborious the process is, what we make is beautiful. We are all finding within ourselves sources of expression that must have been driven far inside us back on Earth.” 

The beauty Lisse and her fellow colonists find in manual labor, creating everything without the aid of technology, implies that life without modern technology is preferable. Hughes shows the teens idolizing pre-industrial life to show that technology’s drawbacks outweigh its benefits. Furthermore, the novel suggests the return to more traditional living, rather than corrupt city life, allows humans to live more peacefully.

“Our memories hold all the discoveries of humankind: coal, gas, oil, electricity, fission power. Pollution. The end of the line. Pollution caused the sudden drop in fertility that nearly destroyed human life on Earth.”

The novel warns readers of the negative consequences of pollution from modern technology, depicting pollution as the cause of the apocalypse that results in the dystopian future the teens inhabit. Lisse and her companions view human’s past pollution problems as a cautionary tale that they must remember or else they are doomed to repeat it.