The Broken World
Tim Etchells
420 pages
published in 2008

Long live the public library. If it wasn't for the fact that Night of Knives caught my eye having, I never would've seen The Broken World lurking nearby on the shelve, with a cover that looked like it could be something sufficiently science fictional as well. It turned out not to be, but I'm not complaining. Instead this is a novel that would appeal to any geek at least on a surface level, as it's the story of a twentysomething slacker putting his considerable intelligence in playing through The Broken World, his favourite game while writing a walkthrough for it. In the process the game and his real life start melding together, his friends popping up in the game while developments there mirror what's happening to him outside of it and vice versa.

I started out hoping this would be a mindfuck novel, ala the Illuminantus trilogy or certain Philip K. Dick novels where the boundaries between fiction and reality are deliberately underminded until the novel seeps through in your own life, but alas. Instead, this is Microserfs for a generation to which playing computer games is as interesting and important as computer programming, an examination of modern life through a shared metaphor rather than an undermining of it.

The Broken World is quite obviously not inspired by any one real game, just too complex with its mixture of genres and settings and elaborate storyline. Structured as a single player realtime adventure game, it has the hero progressing from one town to another solving puzzles in search of his true love, with a swapover in the middle where it's the true love you get to play. It starts off as a sort of Silent Hill type zombiecalypse, switches to a sci-fi adventure, a grim 'n gritty political thriller and so on. These are the best parts, as the real world story is the stuff of every slacker comedy ever. Twentysomething guy who is content to stay in his cocoon playing videogames and indulging in such childish pursuits is forced to join the real world and become a man to win back his much more ambitious (inexplicibly hot) girlfriend while the death of one of his closest friends confronts him with his own morality. It's Shaun of the Dead with the zombies safely confined to the computer game.

What's interesting about The Broken World is its sense of place. It doesn't have any. Or rather, it's described in such generic terms that it could be set almost anywhere in the modern "western" world. At first I thought it was set in the UK, some inner city cheap and studenty neighbourhood London or perhaps even Birmingham or Manchester, some place where young people come to and can live the bedsit life, sharing flats with quasi-strangers. Later, with several dropped references to trips to Wisconsin or something like that I began to suspect it might have been set in some anonymous American city too big to be a proper college town and too small to be New York. In the end it doesn't really matter where it's set, even if the cast feels more like Spaced than Harold and Kumar. Etchell's story is universal, the sort of rite of passages thousands of us have gone through after uni, made interesting through Etchells' use of The Broken World.

The Broken World is fun, geeky in a way that's neither apologetic nor indulgent and ultimately flawed. It remains too conventional, too bound to a traditional narrative while not doing much with it. But it's still a good trip even if the destination disappoints.