Game Night is the first novel by Jonny Nexus, the irreverent British humorist and minor gaming celebrity who gave us the inimitable ezine Critical Miss and penned the Slayer's Guide to Game Masters. True to form, Game Night has one of those concepts that is so simple you can't help kicking yourself for not thinking of, and yet also so sly you want to kick the author for thinking of it himself: it is a fantasy novel translated through the lens of really bad roleplaying.
Imagine all the hilariously stupid, infuriating and insane gaming anecdotes you've ever told and heard, put forward as the actual reality of what is transpiring in a fantasy world. Time, logic and reality become elastic as arguments over rules, narratives and personal grudges shift the events of the story to suit the whims of a highly dysfunctional and mismatched gaming group. The device Nexus uses for this is having two separate but interlaced stories going on, in two different fonts. The first is the story of six gods engaging in what we would recognise as a roleplaying game, although with metaphysical consequences and a flimsy mythological framework. The second is the story of the mortals that the gods move and control through the events the GM describes. As the gaming group sways in and out of sanity and miscellanea, so too the lives of their mortals sways in and out of strangeness and casual violence.
This transference is, as necessary, total, direct and immediate. For example, a discussion in the "OverRealm" about whether the fact that a god has not mentioned to the GM that his mortal has been going to the bathroom throughout the entire campaign implies that his mortal has not actually been going to the bathroom causes said mortal to immediately feel an incredible pressure on his bladder - for reasons he cannot explain or hope to understand - and said feeling vanishes the moment the argument ends.
That's a simple and poor example that doesn't really express the true potential of humour in what may seem like a simplistic or shallow idea. The question then is whether the book maximises this potential and taps into a deep comedy vein. The answer is: hell yes.
Game Night is gut-bustingly, rib-tearingly, bed-wettingly hilarious. It's also sharply observed, cunningly crafted and decidedly well-written, but it's the funny that leaves the impact.
Most humour books try to be novels-with-jokes, if you will. As such, aren't as funny as say, sketch comedies which are simply a series of great jokes run together. The last novel I read that was devoted to just being a string of comedy sketches was The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (taken of course, from a radio show that was a series of sketches run together). Hitchhikers was, as a result, the funniest novel I've ever read, and the only one that has ever made laugh out-loud. Until, that is, Game Night came along.
This is one of those books you cannot read in a crowded space because having to constantly breaking into spontaneous guffaws looks unseemly, if not unbalanced. So does having to get up and wipe your eyes, not to mention falling off the couch because you were laughing so hard. The last indeed may cause your significant other to stare witheringly at you for quite some time, while the laughter may lead to permanent and disabling injury. There should probably be a warning label on this book, something like Warning: May Cause Cohabitors to Brain You With Cooking Utensils Because You Can't Stop Giggling Like A Hyperactive Schoolgirl.
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And that's why Game Night is so great. Above and beyond its relentless hilarity, it captures not just the inherent humanity of the players but also the inherent wonder and the sheer childlike fun of the hobby. For all its savage lampooning, this remains a parody full of love, and it makes me want to game. Not with the players described, of course, but if games so horribly dysfunctional can be this awesome, how much more fun can be had when things are far more aligned? And can I get some friends together on Saturday and find out?
Game Night, in short, leaves us hungry for another. -- RPGNet review by Steve Darlington, April 18, 2008
Jonny Nexus is thought by many to be the leading humour writer on the subject of roleplaying games.
He's served as a regular columnist for the magazines Valkyrie and Signs & Portents, wrote the Slayers Guide to Games Masters for leading gaming company Mongoose Publishing, and is the editor and chief writer of the cult webzine Critical Miss.
Outside of writing, he lives in West London with his wife and a menagerie of house plants and works as a programmer in the City of London. "Jonny Nexus" is, of course, a pseudonym.
