You would be too, if you thought about it. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it. “Jernau Gurgeh,” the machine said, making a sighing noise, “a guilty system recognizes no innocents. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit at the same time.”

As a historical exercise it might have some value, As a work of the intellect, it's just a waste of time. To attempt to construct a game on any other lines, no matter how complicated and subtle the rules are, and regardless of the scale and differentiation of the playing volume and the variety of the powers and attibutes of the pieces, is inevitably to schackle oneself to a conspectus which is not merely socially but techno-philosophically lagging several ages behind our own. The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck.

They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies. Generally, all the best mechanistic games - those which can be played in any sense 'perfectly', such as a grid, Prallian scope, 'nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions - can be traced to civilisations lacking a realistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). In this, the future is a game time is one of the rules. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains makkeable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail victory, to use an unfashionable word. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance the same description may be applied to the best, most elefant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games.

Iain banks the player of games