Ender's Game?

As I was reading through Anda’s Game, it struck me that had this been written even just 10 years ago, it would’ve been classified as much more science fiction rather than plain old regular fiction. One of the only areas that we've come close to reaching the high arching predictions of such sci-fi is personal entertainment, especially with computers. We don't have holodecks or Matrix plugs yet, but I'd say we've come a pretty far way in a short span of time.

This led me to wondering if "Anda's Game" is something of a play on "Ender's Game", a sci-fi book I'm sure many of those in our class have read. I don't want to turn this into some sort of a literature review, but I thought it would be cool to point out some similarities. Both stories had children being put into mock war environments which had far greater consequences than they realized. In Ender's game, there also was a weird sort of learning game that Ender would play. It wasn't interactive with other people, but the purpose of the game was not specified and he could basically roam around and do whatever he wanted, maybe something like an offline second life. Also, both authors seem to like going into great detail about the accents and vernacular of the characters, which I thought was neat!

Another thing I was wondering is what was the time frame of Anda's Game, possibly a few years in the future? In real life there are still no games that are quite as immersive as Anda’s Game describes, at least in my personal experience. I've never really been able to get that much involved with massively multiplayer online games because there's always been a certain disconnect with the gameplay. I suppose it would require universally higher bandwidth to have that kind of intense action, because RPG style play which is usually necessary in the massively online world is not enough to immerse me. I wouldn't say that I am a hardcore gamer, but I think I would probably at least be classified as one of the "gamers" that Brandon was talking about. I need to have some sort of objective and competition to enjoy a game, so Second Life really seems like just another form of work to me at this point. Hopefully over the course of this class I will be able to learn more about it and gain some new appreciation for the MMO style games.