People would swallow anything, just anything at all. Apparently some people found this dismaying. He thought it was a gift, the most wonderful opport… - Iain Banks

Well," he sighed to no one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. "Here we are again.

The set-up assumes that the game and life are the same thing, and such is the pervasive nature of the idea of the game within the society that just by believing that, they make it so.

But did that mean that the urge to live was the result of some sort of illusion? Was the reality, in fact, that nothing mattered and people were fools to think that anything did? Were the choices either despair, the rejection of reason for some idiot faith, or a sort of defensive solipsism?