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.
Character Analysis
Lisse
Lisse is the protagonist and the narrator of the novel. As a child, she was separated from her parents and sent to a Government School. At the start of the novel, she is a teenager on the cusp of entering the adult world. She does not have a particular talent that distinguishes her from her peers, aside from an interest in reading. At her graduation ceremony, she discovers that The Government has designated her as unemployed. She moves to the city with other unemployed students from her school and experiences a loss of innocence when she sees the street violence and gangs that dominate her neighborhood.
Lisse is observant of her surroundings and tries to avoid conflict. Knowing that the Government’s Thought Police are watching her actions makes her feel anxious, but she is also concerned about crime and is grateful when the thought police round up the criminals responsible for attacking her friend Alden. Like the rest of her group, Lisse is relatively conformist. She prefers to abide by the law and looks down on those who take drugs or commit crimes. As an unemployed person, she does not have much agency, but she mostly accepts The Government’s power over her life. When she first arrives in the city, she has a crush on Brad. However, after her group survives an attack by a criminal gang, she starts to view her friends as family and no longer sees Brad as a love interest.
Lisse develops a strong emotional attachment to The Game, viewing The Game as her main reason for living. Once she and the others arrive on the new planet, her resourcefulness aids the group’s survival. Her optimism helps her to cope with the realization that she has been transported to a new planet without her consent, and she is able to view it as an opportunity to have a new life in a new society that she can help to build. She marries a man from another colony on Prize and becomes pregnant. While she seems to be in love with her husband, her marriage also stems from a sense of duty to populate the new world.
Lisse struggles to determine what her place is within the new society. She ultimately decides to write the story of her group’s journey to the new planet for the benefit of her future child. While Lisse’s transformation from the beginning of the novel to the end is a subtle one, it is still significant. Her choosing to become a writer represents a new phase in her life that mirrors the initial graduation event where she accepts her designation as unemployed. While she may have been exiled to a new planet without her consent, on Prize she has the power to determine her own fate.
Benta
Benta is Lisse’s best friend. Like most of the characters in Lisse’s group, Benta is a flat character who is defined mostly by her area of expertise, agriculture. She is intelligent and caring, and she’s one of the few people with whom Lisse has a close relationship. She is one of the two students who secure a job after graduation, cluing the reader in to the importance of family connections in Lisse’s dystopic society. Benta’s strong ties to her family contrast Lisse’s status as an orphan.
The miserable conditions of city life shock Benta, who has been relatively privileged compared to her unemployed friends. When she finds out that it’s possible The Government expelled her from her home just so she could join The Game, she becomes distraught. While Benta, like the other teens, has little agency to make her own decisions, she suffers more than the others due to her close ties to her family. However, once she immerses herself in The Game, her concerns fade away. She is entranced by The Game and becomes a useful resource for the others for determining which plants are safe to eat. Ultimately, she adapts to life on the new planet just as easily as Lisse does, marrying a man from the other tribe.
Rich
Rich is a foil to Lisse’s character. Another student at the school, Rich comes from a privileged background since his father is a psychiatrist. Like Benta, he can use his family connections to find a job: He joins his father’s practice as an apprentice. Rich is abrasive, arrogant, and condescending. He brags about having a job in front of his friends who are unemployed and seems to have no moral qualms about benefitting from the suffering of the unemployed. His main interests are money and status.
Rich’s pessimism greatly contrasts with the other teens’ outlooks, especially Lisse’s. When the Government lays him off and sends him to live with the other teens, he does not accept his fate without complaint as the other teens do when they find out they are unemployed. Instead, he whines and sulks. While the ostensible reason Rich joins them in The Game is because he has medical training, he also serves the role of skeptic in the group. He questions whether The Game is real or just a simulation and speculates that it is a method of social control to pacify the unemployed. He tends to assume the worst intentions on the part of The Government, voicing concerns and doubts that Lisse has in her own mind but does not express aloud.
Rich is portrayed in a mostly negative light, although Lisse sympathizes with him because he has experienced the greatest change in status and material conditions out of anyone in their group. Still, Rich’s role as an intellectual defies masculine norms, causing the others to mock him. The other teens view him as soft and view his disinterest in physical training as laziness. The teens only value Rich for his medical training, which he puts to use when they are transported to a new planet. By the end of the book, Rich eventually becomes more accepted by the group and adapts to life on the new planet.
Lisse’s Group
Lisse’s group consists of the unemployed teens who all attended the same school with Lisse and are assigned to live in the same Designated Area in the city. The original members of the group include Scylla, Karen, Katie, Trent, Paul, Alden, and Brad. Later in the novel, Rich and Benta, who both initially have jobs, join the group after they lose their jobs. The teens in Lisse’s group are all flat characters defined by their area of expertise: Scylla is an artist, Karen is a historian, Katie is a geologist, Trent is a political scientist, Paul is a musician, Alden is a chemist, and Brad is a jack-of-all-trades. Some of the teens also have other notable characteristics: Brad is handsome, Trent and Paul have a history of conflict and often quarrel, and Scylla acts like a mother to the others.
When Lisse’s group first arrives in the city, they decide to live together to help each other survive in the dangerous city. They struggle to find purpose in unemployment since they have nothing to occupy their time. They decide to sample the nightlife, and when Alden has a bad run-in with a gang, they defend him. The entire group grows closer after this incident. The group plays The Game together, cooperating and collaborating to unlock the secrets of The Game. The Game gives all the teens a renewed sense of purpose, serving the role of a job or even a religion. It helps them structure their days and gives them a reason to live.
Lisse’s group represents a microcosm of human society at its best. Rather than letting internal conflict interrupt their progress, they always find a way to cooperate to solve their problems. Once The Government takes them to a new planet, they use their collective knowledge to forge a utopian colony that is fair, efficient, and bountiful. The harmony amongst the group at the end of the novel shows their development into responsible adults who have left behind their growing pains on Earth.
The Game Manager
The Game Manager personifies The Government, since he is the only government figure the teens meet. It is unclear if he has any personal interest in The Game. Instead, he represents The Government’s interests. His conversations with the teens suggest that he views The Game as an experiment and that the goal of The Game is for the teens to cooperate to solve problems. However, it is never confirmed if he has the power to monitor the teens once they have emigrated to a new planet, or if he has any role beyond facilitating the initial stage of The Game.
The Government
Lisse and the other teens refer to the oppressive state that controls all aspects of their lives as The Government. The Government, presumably of what was once The United States or North America due to location references in the text, is a morally ambiguous, totalitarian regime. The Government responded to the plummeting of the human population due to infertility from pollutants by creating robots to run most of the economy. However, once the human population began to grow again, the use of automation led to high rates of unemployment. As a result, the Government decides each citizen’s fate, determining what kind of job, if any, they are allowed to have. It treats the unemployed as second-class citizens, providing them with their basic needs but banishing them to undesirable neighborhoods in crime-ridden cities. It tightly controls its citizens’ ability to travel and forbids unemployed people from using technology. It has brigades of Thought Police who respond to any crimes or rebellion against the regime with swift violence, and it constantly surveils the population.
Nevertheless, Hughes does not portray The Government as evil. It exists in a moral gray area since its methods are cruel, but it is not malevolent. Its objective is to maintain order among the unemployed through policing and through keeping the unemployed occupied by The Game. It uses The Game to manipulate the unemployed into feeling like they have a purpose in life, but it also has another aim of sending unemployed people to another planet to colonize it. Ironically, after it sends people to another planet, it relinquishes its power over them, leaving them to determine their own fate.
Hughes depicts The Government as having the power of a deity. It is omnipresent and absolute in its power. Like the Christian God, it determines who is worthy of being sent to “Paradise,” in this case, the new planet. Despite its constant presence in the teens’ lives, it is a mysterious force whose actions they must interpret because it never directly explains its intentions.
