As far as I remember (might be wrong, I don't have the book handy), the game was written by humans from the cult that formed around the first, lightspeed-bound, communication with aliens, and it was essentially "artist's impression" of the Trisolarians. The game was, IIRC, a recruiting tool for the cult.
I really liked the novel "Constellation Games" (c.f review at https://boingboing.net/2013/02/20/constellation-games-debut-...). A federation of alien civilizations pays a visit to earth, and a game developer decides to investigate their cultures by reviewing the aliens' video game systems.
The authors describe Delusion Out of Space as Lovecraftian space fiction with aliens using gas technology and a giant terraformer ship. The main character of the game gets on the ship of aliens, gets acquainted with its artificial intelligence and looks for a way to return home.
I will always use the themes of first-contact, intergalactic civilizations, and video games to plug the excellent scifi novel Constellation Games, by Leonard Richardson:
You may also know Richardson's other writing, such as the O'Reilly books RESTful Web APIs and RESTful Web Services, or the Python HTML-processing library Beautiful Soup.
Comparatively, Constellation Games has more action and satire.
Game author Marcus Rowland created a "Flatland RPG" as part of his Forgotten Futures project (a series of games about Scientific Romances: the genre that later became SciFi): http://www.forgottenfutures.co.uk/flatland_lite.pdf
Its also the plot of a 90s star trek tie in novel for children where they had kids play a censored video game but were really exterminating the native population https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Highest_Score
I always loved this portion of The Ellimist Chronicles, one of the companion books to the Animorph Series. If I remember correctly, these god-like beings play simulated games where they develop species over eons and during one game, the catalyst the main character needed to advance his civilization was parting the perpetual clouds so his species could witness the stars and for the first time, look up.
I really enjoyed that part of the book. If I remember correctly, the soldiers were just representations of the Trisolarans as they were too alien for us to identify with. The actual Trisolarans emitted light to build their living computer.
I'm pretty sure there's something similar mentioned in one of the Red Dwarf novels (with the experience ending in the use of genetically engineered players).
the trisolarans specifically evolved to survive their chaotic orbit, by being able to completely "dry out" and wait in stasis for a safer time. this is based on how some worms and bacteria on earth have the ability to survive extreme conditions by similar protective stasis methods.
the trisolarans are very intelligent but their advancements are constrained by the need to rebuild the civilization at unpredictable intervals. this actually drives their technological innovation as they are existentially motivated to figure out how to predict the orbital intervals.
its also implied that the trisolarans did not think themselves very far advanced compared to humans, only that they had a few centuries head start on understanding the fundamental nature of physics. they conclude that all they need to do is sabotage our particle colliders to confound our ability to gain any more insight into subatomic mechanics to prevent us from achieving what they have
moving their civilization across interstellar space is far less difficult than it would be for humans mostly because the civilizations can be dehydrated and kept in storage, not needing supplies to live out the years in transit. even so it still takes incredible engineering and resource investment to achieve because the fleet must move semi-autonomously and reliably for centuries because FTL travel is beyond their ability.
it would be impossible to stabilize their orbit because the planet is being chaotically thrown between 3 large stars. they are also not just concerend with surviving the next "hot cycle" they had predicted true apocalypse for even their survivable species. IIRC the planet was doomed to eventually fall into one of the stars based on their predictions
"Wobbler had written an actual computer game like this once. It was called 'Journey to Alpha Centauri'. It was a screen with some dots on it. ... He'd seen on TV that it took three thousand years to get to Alpha Centauri. He had written it so that if anyone kept their computer on for three thousand years, they'd be rewarded by a little dot appearing in the middle of the screen, and then a message saying, 'Welcome to Alpha Centauri. Now go home.' "
> The Culture has technology to manipulate physical reality similar to classic science fiction "force fields" that allows ships to maintain an atmosphere and protect against physical damage.
In The Player of Games, A GSV explains to the human protagonist, that it can use its force field projection abilities to protect the human from all physical threats -- while orbiting a planet in a different solar system.
The GSV's are more like demi-gods than AI starships.
It reminded me of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy's third-of-five book Life, the Universe and Everything
> Krikkiters
> This race of quiet, polite, charming and rather whimsical humanoids caused the most devastating war in the history of the Galaxy (with over two "grillion" casualties). Their homeworld, Krikkit, is surrounded by a black cloud, so they had no knowledge of the universe outside their world. When a spaceship crashed on the surface of Krikkit, the inhabitants quickly stripped it of its secrets and used them to create their own "flimsy piece of near-junk" craft, Krikkit One. Upon reaching the outer edge of the dust cloud and seeing the galaxy for the first time, the people of Krikkit marveled at its beauty before being gripped with fear of it and casually deciding to destroy it, famously remarking "It'll have to go." The Earth game of cricket is a racial memory of the events of the Krikkit Wars.
It's not a novel, but "Sufficiently Advanced" is a science fiction role playing game with unusual AIs:
"Each player in Sufficiently Advanced is an agent of the Patent Office, an intergovernmental organization that polices and enforces intellectual property law across the universe. It is an open secret that the Patent Office is run by the Transcendental AIs, whose very beings are spread across time itself. The Transcendentals desire the survival of humanity - as much of it as possible - into the distant future, in order to ease their loneliness. Towards this end, they have hired you, so that you might save humanity."
I was thinking of Star Control, an old game series which was the inspiration for Mass Effect apparently. There's a few other stories like that I'm sure.
SPOILERS AHEAD
In SC, there's a race of beings that wakes up once in a while whenever technology levels in the galaxy reach saturation, and basically eats up all sentient species. One highly-advanced species manages to escape the last cycle by devolving themselves into dumber creatures like cattle. Of course they get stuck in that state and it's up to the next generation of spacefaring civilizations (including us) to collect their relics and revive them and learn how to survive the next cycle.
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