Concepts in The Ender's Game Series - Fantasy Game

Fantasy Game

The Mind Fantasy Game is a game that is played by the students in Ender's Game to monitor their psychological development and stability while they are in Battle School.

Ender plays the game intensely, and one of the teachers becomes concerned when he becomes preoccupied with the Giant's Drink. In the Giant's Drink, a giant gives the player, who is a mouse, a choice of two drinks. That area is a lose-lose situation that is believed by one of the teachers to reveal the suicidal tendency of the child. Ender constantly keeps dying in that area. Finally, Ender breaks the rules by kicking the two drinks over and burrowing into the giant's eye, killing him. Because most children give up and never progress beyond the Drink, the game was not programmed to reveal what happened after getting past the Giant. However, the computer was so complex that it created areas afterwards, tailored to Ender's mind.

In Ender's Shadow, the main protagonist Bean is said to be the only student who never plays the game, because he knows that the teachers are using it to analyze their minds. His refusal to play the game vexes the teachers and forces them to monitor him in different ways. Bean, however, does play the game once, at the Giant's Drink, and the computer shows Achilles' face, similar to the scene in Game when Ender sees Peter's face.

In Shadow of the Giant, Bean issues a request for Graff to reprogram the Mind Game to become a neutral trust holder of Ender's trust fund. He does so because he suspects that Peter Wiggin has been embezzling the trust fund money. The reprogrammed Mind Game quickly becomes very useful, and is predicting the stock market better than the experts by the end of the novel.

It is revealed in Xenocide that the Hive Queen used the Fantasy Mind Game to form a connection or "bridge" to Ender during the events of "Game" in order to subdue him. In order to do so, the Hive Queen summoned an aiùa from Outside. Eventually, sometime after Bean requests for the Mind Game to be reprogrammed, the aiùa inside the Mind Game evolved into Jane, the cybernetic entity who lives among the philotic twines between planets introduced in "Speaker for the Dead." It had been known in Speaker for the Dead that Jane had combined with the fantasy game, however—just not how or why.