In 2010, film critic Roger Ebert declared that video games were not art and never would be. This kicked off a tremendous online debate, which as far as I know is still going on in some quarters. I’m not sure which side of the argument Matt Dinniman would fall on, but in OPERATION BOUNCE HOUSE, he raises the question of whether or not writing fiction about video games is an art…or at least art-adjacent.

The particular style of video games that Dinniman is writing about here is what is ungainly described as an MMOFPS --- a massively multiplayer online first-person shooter. First-person shooter games have been around since the dawn of gaming. I remember playing the first monochrome version of a game called Castle Wolfenstein on a first-generation Macintosh in the late 1980s. You sent your video avatar through a castle infested with Nazis on a quest to kill Hitler. (In later versions, Hitler was outfitted with multiple machine guns.) Advances in technology meant that you could take the experience online and play with countless other people. These days, if you are so inclined and are talented enough, you can make a living playing these games online and streaming the results to a worldwide audience.

"Dinniman has taken the clever step of inverting the perspective of the MMOFPS concept.... OPERATION BOUNCE HOUSE is smartly done and deftly written, but it isn’t trying to be anything other than postmodern schlock."

Dinniman has taken the clever step of inverting the perspective of the MMOFPS concept. The villains in his story are the people playing the game and streaming the results --- and cold-blooded villains they are. They have been told that they are to exterminate a hostile subhuman population on a barren, far-away planet --- a familiar enough gaming scenario --- and they take to their task with gusto.

However, what the players are really doing, unbeknownst to them, is slaughtering actual human colonists on a settled planet. The heroes of the story are second-generation colonists, living in a small farming community, who are surprised to learn that they are being invaded by remote-controlled robots piloted by idiot teenagers looking for virtual online kicks.

The premise of OPERATION BOUNCE HOUSE is interesting enough, but the execution involves unpacking and reworking generations of science fiction tropes. The overall concept is an inversion of ENDER’S GAME, which is about genius teenagers being tricked into mass slaughter through a video game. (The villains here are anything but geniuses; Dinniman has unholy amounts of fun satirizing this particular subculture.) The heroes are aided by a powerful artificial intelligence, similar to the rebels in Robert A. Heinlein’s THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS. (The AI is named “Roger,” and whether or not that’s a reference to Ebert is anyone’s guess.) The titular game is the creation of a vast corrupt corporation out of Blade Runner or Alien.

But if the plot strands hark back to earlier science fiction visions, the characters are as up-to-date as next Tuesday. (In a novel that requires a lot of technological heavy lifting, possibly the most far-fetched thing about it is the insistence that 2020’s online culture is going to be carried forward into the distant future.) Even in a tiny farming community on a far-off planet, popular culture has seeped into every crevice of their minds and saturated their language.

How much any of this criticism will make a difference to Dinniman’s fan base (he is also the author of the hugely popular Dungeon Crawler Carl series) is up for debate. I think the one thing he has conclusively proven is that Roger Ebert was right. Video games aren’t art, and novels about video games don’t quite make the threshold either. OPERATION BOUNCE HOUSE is smartly done and deftly written, but it isn’t trying to be anything other than postmodern schlock.