Dream Park (Paperback)

The story is relatively simple. A group of pretend adventurers suit up for a campaign called "The South Seas Treasure Game". As in the early Role Playing Games, there are Dungeon Masters, warriors, magicians and thieves. But the difference here is that they play in an artificial enclosure that has been enhanced with special effects, holograms, actors and a clever storyline. The players get as close as possible to truly living their adventure.

The plot thickens when a security guard inside the park is murdered and the main suspects are those playing the game. The park's head of security, Alex Griffin, joins the game to find the killer, but finds new meaning in the games he helps keep alive.

In my youth, this was all fascinating, thrilling stuff. I wanted nothing more than for Dream Park to become reality. The game was deftly plotted and there was a good deal of humor throughout. The characters, except for Griffin, were not rendered well, but I didn't care. They did their jobs as fodder for the game master's trickery and that was all I needed. The authors' real genius lie in the descriptions of the workings of the park and of the game.

I recently reread Dream Park. At the age of 40, the adventure still stands strong. It's not exactly an adult's book, but neither is it strictly for young adults. The ideas and concepts that were once fresh and startling are now old hat to readers of Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, but the archaic ideas about what was possible add a sense of nostalgia, a glimpse of what the world was like when it stood on the rim of the present. For this reason, Dream Park might be enjoyable to new readers, adults and teens alike.

Sadly, much of what was predicted has not yet come to pass. Real-time gaming has not gone much further than seedy laser-tag parlors on the outskirts of town. But I know it's possible. It's going to happen. I just need to be patient.

This novel has everything that was good about "Dream Park", but still manages to be a tedious, less interesting version of the original. Most of the familiar characters are back, Griffin, the tough-as-nails Security Chief with the heart of gold, Acacia Garcia, the tough-as-nails gamer with the squishy insides, Tony McWhirter, the hacker criminal made good. They're all tossed into the Dream park salad to play a game called "California Voodoo", which would be fine if not for the fact that - DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUUHHHH - someone gets killed before the game and the Dream Park staff must infiltrate the game in order to catch the killer without setting off the alarms, spooking the gamers or losing their merchandising rights.

Just like the other two novels.

Sadly, this outing picks up a little of the creaky, world-weariness of the second book and keeps none of the rollicking, out and out fun of the first. The concept of Voodoo magick played out in a gigantic, ruined building is at once interesting and limiting. The authors, for all their bibliographic citations, show only a rudimentary understanding of vodoun and its many variations. The random appearance of loa is distracting and confusing.

The thing that was most fun about "Dream Park" was the fact that Griffin had to join a game as a player and track his prey from under cover; this meant the reader got to experience the game much as the players did. Here, the real focus is on the investigation. Too much takes place outside the game, too little explanation goes into the game and the authors don't really support the world they've created within the walls of Dream Park.

Frankly, the mystery just isn't that compelling. While the outcome may have cost Dream Park's parent company a ton of dough, I just didn't care. While the villain had murdered someone in the beginning of the book, I just didn't care about the victim or the methods used to catch the killer. What I DID care about was The Game. And there just wasn't enough game to go around.

The writing duo's prose this time around is more accessible than in The Barsoom Project and those reading the series for the first time will not be too disappointed to finish here instead of there. But overall, the magic feels like it's gone.

In fact, I was eager to find this in paperback, because a lot of people seem to rate it highly both as adventure fiction and for its portrayal of role playing and roleplayers.

I was severely disappointed. The characters are pretty wooden, and the world itself is pretty unconvincing. The authors try to convince us that the "Game" is a big thing, carrying huge monetary gains for TV rights and novelization, but I really fail to see how public could really be interested in this.

The attempts to make us sympathize with the players and seeing how they are so engrossed in it to actually care more for the game itself than the rest of the world are pretty unconvincing, too, and the story seems flat and forced in more than a place.

Characters' psychology is probably not a forte for Niven, but unfortunately all the SFX razzle dazzle fail to carry the story... just like an Hollywood action film, in fact.