It's merely a page-turner - there's no reason to play the game a second time, except to study narratology. What's missing is a larger purpose – “Do Not Push The Red Button” doesn't leave us with an enhanced sense of the plight of today's woman etc. You will also be asked to play a simple card game to see how it feels to make your decisions strategically. Motivated examples and some history of game theory will be provided. There's a rhythm involved – I think that rhythm is part of why I kept going - and there's an escape into a world with its own rules. We will see that the concept of rational decision making is useful, but it is not quite sufficient to provide governing principles. Pressing the button is like turning the page. There aren't many novels whose opening pages rely this heavily on reverse psychology – Clive Barker's Mister B.
Was it a sense of competition that kept me engaged, even during the most boring stage when there were 127 decoy buttons? There's humor and suspense and apocalypse. Storytelling at its simplest? There's a narrator with a personality. In the words of David Foster Wallace, “There’s some weird, delicate, I-trust-you-not-to fuck-up-on-me relationship between the reader and writer, and both have to sustain it.” For me, this game somehow sustained that relationship. What does this game have to tell us about holding the reader's attention? Give it a go.Ĭould you stop pushing the red button? I couldn't.
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