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Clines´ love for retro games and the immense detail, wit, and the idea of integrating the games into the plot make it a piece of, sadly just one, master storytelling.

Back in the good old retro game days
Everyone who grew up in a time when those games were a part of childhood may find the novel even more amazing, as it fuses nostalgia, fictional reality, and a cyberworld. It also does this in a not too complex, hard sci fi way that usually keeps many people away from entering too exhaustive to read sci fi subgenres. To achieve that

It´s combining a cyberpunk setting with video game history crash courses
in a dystopian setting and not too many plotlines It´s readable for everyone, as said, not just for Sci-Fi enthusiasts, as it´s the case for many too sciency and info-dumpy cyberpunk novels.

Kind of going in the hardcore fan direction of Minecraft and Fortnite
It´s similar to fanfiction novels about extremely popular games like Minecraft and a predecessor to many future series that will find their fanbase in gamers, not so much in movies anymore, because the economic impact and numbers of users of games will explode even more than it already does. As exactly predicted in the novel probably under the same economic circumstances, especially in the US, not so much in the EU with Keynesian economics, but totally in many countries of the Southern hemisphere as the only save free time option in hellhole cities surrounded by dead, toxic environments.

How to combine game and reality
There is a wide range of possible variations, such as a plot set just in the game, in reality, and the game, in different versions of the game, between competing fandoms, games and gamers in real life, the game, AR, VR, alternative and parallel realities, universes, dimensions, etc. One of the most thrilling aspects of it would be to include dreams as the fourth option with the permanent insecurity if it´s the current reality, the game, another layer of reality, or a dream. And we´re not even mentioning drugs, cyborgs, and aliens in this mix.

I´m a bit jealous because future generations will have the most epic entertainment mix ever
They´re the ones who will spend thousands of hours playing games during childhood and adolescence, maybe as babies and toddlers too with special pediatric software and hardware (already playing the womb might be a bit too immersive, except its bio nanobot mother child brain implant), combining the unique experience to switch between books, games, and reality including as many elements of fiction as one wishes to be displayed or faded out by AR and VR.

Hopefully, many great sci fi series will be turned into such fully immersive, virtual worlds. The imagination to read the prodigies of the sci fi genre a second, third, and fourth time, combined with playing 8k overkills of the stories made real as online shooters, MMORPG, or just freaking silly jump and runs, makes me drool in ecstasy. Disgusting.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:



Sadly the reviews of his other novels are so bad that I haven´t read them, which seems to make Player number one the one hit wonder of an author who couldn´t manage to deliver more than one milestone.