IN Iain M Banks’s sci-fi novel The Player of Games, one of the best game players in the galaxy, Gurgeh, is sent to play a fiendishly complex game called “Azad” on an alien planet. 

Azad is played on a vast three-dimensional board with a dizzying array of cards, pieces, and strategies. The alien civilisation venerate it so highly that they are known as the Empire of Azad, and they hold a regular tournament where the overall winner is crowned emperor.
 
Gurgeh has been sent by his civilisation in an attempt to destabilise the aliens. He has only a few years to learn how to play, using his knowledge of all other known games in co-ordination with mind-enhancing drugs. The novel hinges on his growing addiction to the game of Azad, to the extent that he overlooks the wider games in which he is just a small part.
 
The novel is Banks at his satirical best. Gurgeh is from The Culture, a future “post-scarcity” civilisation run by benevolent AIs called “Minds.” The Culture don’t officially intervene in other alien worlds, but in this novel they unofficially they send Gurgeh to undermine. 

In contrast, the Empire of Azad is not dissimilar to our present society: a strict hierarchy with vast suffering and cruelty. Banks manages to make the reader sympathise with Azad, understanding its citizens’ outrage as “superior” beings with unfair advantages condescend to play games with their civilisation at no risk to themselves. Banks allows for ambiguity in Gurgeh’s motives: is he doing it for the love of the game or to prevent the suffering of others? 

The novel was published in 1988. Banks is a multivalent writer and the book has diverse themes beyond the scope of this column – including the relationship between masculinity, sexuality, and game-playing – but it can be productively read as an exploration of foreign interventionism. The Culture’s interventionism is more subtle than the liberal interventionism that has failed so disastrously in recent decades, most recently and horrifyingly in Afghanistan. But there is a similarity: the understanding of geopolitical strategies at some fundamental level as “games.”
 
This relationship is a powerful one. In the 19th century, “The Great Game” grew to be the term given to the conflict between Britain and Russia in central Asia, including over Afghanistan. The historian Malcolm Yapp has traced the origins of this phrase, suggesting it came from games of cards or dice and had connotations of “risk, chance, and deception.” 

As such, it was an attractive metaphor for British imperialists. Kipling’s use of it in his novel Kim crystallised this idea. It cemented the link between imperial strategy and games; the racy fun of strategically vying for power in foreign lands, where the stakes were ultimately someone else’s.  
 
As Yapp notes, the history of the British empire from the 19th century onwards is marked by the prominence of such “strategic debates” – but also by their unreality. For example, he writes about 1946 that “there [was] no contrast more striking than the incongruity of the vain [British] discussions about Middle Eastern strategy… and the reality of the collapse of public order in Palestine when the security forces lost real control.” There are striking similarities with the sudden and disastrous collapse of Kabul: just days ago, US officials briefed that it could happen within “90 days” and pundits talked calmly about the geopolitical effects. It’s now clear how misguided that complacency was.
 
While it was clear to some that the invasion of Afghanistan was a doomed enterprise 20 years ago, there were those who convinced themselves that it made strategic sense. 

The sense of intellectual superiority is fostered by the military-industrial complex, which makes such strategic debates a centrepiece of its worldview. In the 20th century, the discipline of “game theory” grew in prominence. The ability to construe situations as games and calculate optimal strategies is fascinating in mathematics, economics, and evolution, but it gives a false sense of control to actual scenarios. 

The existence of an optimal strategy in a simplified game with perfect knowledge cannot guarantee victory in the real world. A nameless friend of ours has a rule that when playing a board game such as Monopoly, everyone has to promise to play as a “rational agent” seeking to win. This is to prevent people ruining his chances of winning by playing irrationally or chaotically. But one’s view of “rational” depends on an understanding of the motives, desires, and beliefs of the other. 

In real life, where agents have different and often opaque desires, beliefs and aims, game theory fails. Impossible even in actual board games, it is certainly not reasonable when the “game” being played is a war being fought for political expediency against poorly understood enemies, whatever the rhetoric. Those in power claim to be motivated by “the greater good” – but the more important dictum in the minds of our politicians is still, in the words of Henry Newbolt’s 1892 poem, “Play up! Play up! And play the game!”
 
A game is always only part of reality; never the whole. It sits within a society. Banks’s novel presents the fantasy of a civilisation that runs entirely as a game, and shows how bleak and violent “victory” would be, even allowing for that possibility. 

Our world is far messier. We listen to the military strategists and theorists at our peril. Other countries, other people, other lives, are not games for our politicians to play with.
 
Those who waged war have now had to openly acknowledge the failure of their war of supposed liberation, its grand strategy finally exposed as vast ignorance, as Afghanistan is left to the Taliban. 

In one of his last interviews in 2013 before his death, Banks discussed “the great lie that our boys are fighting, killing and dying in Afghanistan to keep us safe. It’s 180 degrees off the truth. They’re dying worse than needlessly; they’re dying to save political face, and for every grieving or just aggrieved Afghan family we create the conditions for further atrocities to be visited on us.”