There is a well-worn story about the late Iain Banks and his relationship to video games. In the 1990s, the puckish, prolific Scottish author – who cheerfully hopscotched between publishing mainstream literary best-sellers as Iain Banks and science fiction novels as Iain M Banks – became so addicted to Sid Meier’s Civilization that it threatened to short-circuit his writing career. Ultimately, he deleted the game from his hard drive in order to resist temptation. But the spirit of Civ – and other games – clearly bled into his work.
In Banks’ bleak 1993 whodunnit Complicity, a speed-dabbing journalist juggles deadlines and sleuthing to maximise the hours he can pour into empire-building PC sim Despot, a “stunningly Machiavellian turbo-screamer of a game”. In a novel not short on gut-punch moments, a particularly sneaky one arrives when the stressed hack gets his confiscated laptop back from the cops. Some plod has unwittingly left the Despot campaign running, and with no guiding hand on the trackpad our rumpled hero’s once-thriving civilisation is ruined and beyond repair. (The book’s capable killer also takes time out from staging baroque murders to share a nifty cheat for an aerial combat sim entitled Xerium that involves surfing the shockwave of a nuclear explosion.)
In 1996’s Excession, the fourth of Banks’s sci-fi novels set in the symbiotic human/machine intergalactic utopia of the Culture, artificial intelligence clever-clogs known as Minds entertain themselves by experimenting with the options sliders on virgin galaxies to analyse the pinballing ways in which they might evolve. This God Mode mucking about is interrupted when an inscrutable but all-powerful onyx sphere appears on the edge of Culture space. In interviews at the time Banks likened that plot development to the stomach-dropping sensation in Civilization of seeing a fleet of AI-controlled ironclad warships on the horizon when your fledgling society has barely mastered clay pots and raffia mats.
More games: Banks’s 2007 family saga The Steep Approach to Garbadale revolves around an eccentric clan living off the proceeds of a perennially popular, none-more-British boardgame called Empire! which – dwindling UK geopolitical influence metaphor alert – is about to be sold off to a US consortium. And an earlier Culture novel, 1988’s The Player of Games, sees a listless grandmaster voyage to a far-flung alien empire where a breathtakingly complex, all-encompassing tournament comes with a suitably epic battle royale prize: becoming Actual Emperor.