Dream Park is the perfect adventure novel for the gamer who reminisces about the days that were spent in arcades beneath neon lights, and the nights that were camped out at your best friend's house, devouring too much pizza and Mountain Dew, creating epic worlds that never were, and fulfilling noble quests that made you larger than life itself! ( )

Wow, this was so much better when I was eighteen. Still a great idea as a speculative prognostication of ARGs long before gaming became a mainstream genre activities. But the prose is patently unbearable. ( )

I wouldn't rate this book as high as I did when I first read it a little over thirty years ago, because now I notice more of it's flaws particularly some of the early dialogue between Griffin, Harmony and Skip being horrendous. It reminded me of cheap 1950's SF movies. Also long ago it was one of the first novels I'd read about fantasy gaming something I was very much into. I've since read many more novels on the subject that I feel are much better, last year's Ready Player One is a prime example of a more exciting and interesting story. But I still like this Dream Park for the mythology surrounding the cargo cults which is still intriguing to me. ( )

Series Info/Source: This is the first book in the Dream Park series (there are four books in this series). I got this as an audiobook through Audible.

Audiobook Quality (4/5): The narration on this audiobook was fine. The narrator does a fine job with character voices and was decent to listen to. While I didn’t love this on audiobook, I thought it was fine.

Story (4/5): I enjoyed this quite a bit. I was surprised at how well this book has aged over the years. I enjoyed the fact that these characters are basically doing a complex LARP but there is a mystery from real life that wraps into their fantasy adventure. The story is well woven and kept me interested. The build up is a bit slow and the hopping back and forth between characters at the beginning is slightly hard to follow and feels a bit fractured, but does come together better as the story continues. Lastly, despite all the unique and fun trappings this is at its heart a straight-forward and fairly predictable who-dun-it type of mystery; which honestly is not my favorite type of story.

Characters (3/5): There are a lot of characters here and at times they are hard to keep track of. The sheer number of characters also makes them hard to relate to. I was a bit worried going in about a lack of strong female characters (given that this is an early 80's book) but was pleasantly surprised to find the characters (female/male) were fairly well balanced. I was also surprised by the rather modern acceptance around different sexualities as well. You still do get some things that feel dated but it's not too bad (women are called baby or sweetie and at points, women need to be saved and protected).

Setting (4/5): The Dream Park setting is an intriguing one. This is basically a futuristic theme park where people can join in on very realistic LARP adventures. These adventures involve a combination of LARP and holograms and other high tech manipulations. It’s a creative idea that is slowly coming to reality for gamers today. It was fun to see how close this is getting to current VR gaming, especially since it was written so long ago.

Writing Style (3/5): The writing here is okay. As I mentioned it starts out pretty rough and feels very fractured. A lot of language feels a bit dated and it has a more stark mid 80’s sci-fi writing style to it. The plot is fairly predictable and the fact that we have to follow so many characters throughout the story (and that a lot of them end up as fodder) was kind of a bummer. I am glad I finally read this and thought it was enjoyable but also have no desire to come back for more.

My Summary (3.5/5): Overall this was decent and I am glad I finally read it. Will I continue to read this series? Probably not. It was a fun listen but the world and characters didn't draw me in enough for me to want to read more. I am also not a huge fan of straight-up who-dun-it murder mysteries. Also parts of this (language, societal thinking) feel a bit dated to me and I just didn’t really enjoy the writing style all that much. ( )

Perhaps the only book so far I've seen capture both science and gaming in the same go effectively. Exceptionally well thought out from novel, science, myth, and game perspectives. ( )