Jane (Ender's Game) - Ender's Game and Shadow Quartet

Ender's Game and Shadow Quartet

In Ender's Game, the Fantasy Game is the faculty's primary method of obtaining information about their students. It is designed to secretly map out the psyche of the players, providing valuable data on each student's thoughts and decision-making processes. Colonel Graff refers to the game sarcastically as the Mind Game. In the course of its service at the Battle School, the Game successfully analyzes every student but one: Bean, who realizes the game's true purpose and refuses to play.

The student chooses a character and plays through a number of scenarios. One scenario, called the Giant's Drink, offers the player a choice between two beverages, with the promise of admission to "Fairyland" with the correct choice. However, the scenario is actually a no-win situation which invariably results in the player's death. By tracking how frequently a player attempts it, the Giant's Drink detects and warns teachers of suicidal tendencies among the students. To their consternation, Ender confronts the Giant obsessively, failing dozens of times. Finally, he refuses to choose a drink and instead attacks the Giant, killing it and becoming the first student to enter Fairyland; the Game generates this new scenario on the spot, orienting it specifically to Ender himself. This creates a deep connection between him and the Game, with significant consequences later on.

In Ender's Shadow, the Fantasy Game is discussed in greater depth. It is described by the teachers themselves as an extremely complex program that generates content procedurally. The Mind Game is never meant to be conclusive, it only makes connections and discovers patterns that are too subtle for the human eye.

In Shadow of the Giant, when Bean suspects Peter Wiggin of embezzling Ender's trust fund for his Hegemony uses, he recalls the nature of the Fantasy Game and requests that Graff place it in charge of Ender's trust fund. The Game, whose original purpose was to seek out patterns across wide fields of data, is modified to predict markets and invest Ender's trust fund appropriately. Alarmingly effective in this new capacity, it is later called upon to review demographic data and help Bean find seven of his eight stolen embryos/children. The Fantasy Game is assumed to have grown in complexity during the 3000-year gap between Shadow of the Giant and Speaker for the Dead, especially as Graff describes the Mind Game as being able to reprogram itself, and finally becomes the sentient Jane.