The Culture is becoming increasingly concerned about the Azad, a civilization out on the edges of the Galaxy, where life is dominated by a strange game which determines all wealth and status. One of the things I like about the Culture is its moral ambiguity. They first come across as a bunch of laid-back, peace-loving hippies, but in fact they are ready to fight at any moment, using whatever weapons they find most appropriate. Sometime, those weapons are anti-matter bombs capable of destroying a solar system. Here, they are planning a devious psychological destabilization manoeuvrer, which is in fact no less deadly.
In 1938, Yasunari Kawabata, a future Nobel Prize winner, was assigned by the Mainichi newspaper to cover a Go match between Honinbo Shusai, the top player, and his challenger Kitani Minoru. Go has an importance in Japanese culture that is hard for a Westerner to understand, and was one of the four traditional arts that a Samurai had to excel in. The match was very even until Kitani played an unexpected move just before an adjournment; its only purpose was to force a response, giving him extra time to think about his next play. This is completely standard practice in chess, but, although permitted by the rules of Go, was contrary to the complicated etiquette of the game. Shusai was shocked and immediately blundered, deciding the outcome. He lost, and died not long after. Kawabata saw Kitani’s adoption of Western pragmatism as a symbolic defeat of Japanese culture, presaging its concrete military defeat in the Second World War. He rewrote his newspaper columns from the match as the novel Meijin “The Master of Go”, and considered it his finest work. The Player of Games is a kind of SF reimagining of Kawabata’s masterpiece, set inside the universe of Iain M. Bank’s Culture.