Title: At Any Price (Gaming the System)
Author: Brenna Aubrey
Publisher: Silver Griffon Associates (13 January 2014)
ISBN: 9781940951010
Reviewer: Jane
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I used to work in the videogame industry. I won’t go into detail, but suffice to say, when At Any Price (Gaming the System) came to my attention earlier in the week via a link in this post by Skye Warren, I was immediately intrigued. My mind began to whir. Was the heroine going to get ‘serviced’ next to the servers? Would the hero decide to ‘review her build’ during the daily Scrum meeting? In my experience, game dev. is a whole load of (stressful) fun, but calling it sexy would be … a stretch, to say the least. Unless you count listening to hundreds of emote .wav files to make sure they don’t sound unintentionally orgasmic, getting shot (repeatedly) with Nerf guns when you tell the dev. team they need to fix a bug the night before manufacturer submission, asking the rigger to make a character’s boobs smaller, and informing the lead artist that the creature he’s spent the last few days concepting needs to look ‘less penis-like’.
However, it turns out that the videogame backdrop for At Any Price (the first in a series of three books by author Brenna Aubrey) is more peripheral than integral, despite the references to patches, servers and avatars. It’s true that Adam, the hero, can code like a god (apparently, he’s the Zeus of C++) but it’s his addiction to his mobile and laptop, rather than his association with MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing) game development, that ultimately define him in Ms Aubrey’s story.
It all starts with an online auction. Gamer girl and blogger, Mia Strong, from whose point-of-view At Any Price is told, is strapped for cash; her mother is recovering from cancer and, thanks to a bunch of medical bills, about to lose her house. Mia herself is struggling to foot her college tuition. What’s a girl to do? Well, if you’re her, you decide, in a rather Catarina Migliorini-meets-Belle de Jour move, to wave your middle finger at the social stigmas surrounding prostitution and sell your virginity online.
I’ve decided to decry the crimes and impositions put upon my sisters since the beginning of time until now. And I offer, therefore, a new paradigm. One where a woman can sell her purity and enjoy the fruits thereof.
I’m not spoiling the story by revealing that Adam Drake, CEO of Draco Multimedia Entertainment, is the guy who wins the right to deflower Mia. But despite a raft of contractual clauses pertaining to said deflowering, things go a bit … awry.
Hands up, I was more than a little worried that our leading man might turn out to be yet another carbon copy of the dreadful Christian Grey (beware the millionaire with the contract), but, thankfully, he managed to dodge the Fifty Shades of Gaming bullet. So how best to describe Mr Drake, then? What sort of man pays three-quarters-of-a-million for some skin and blood? At the risk of revealing myself as a complete geek, one who is Alpha in both the traditional (me Tarzan, you Jane) and gaming (fully functional but his assets need work) senses of the word.
Mia? She, too, is very much a work in progress – not without her bugs and, like Adam, in possession of an emotional and social codebase that needs a whole lot of finishing.
At Any Price raises some interesting and difficult questions. If you sell yourself for money, just the once, are you a prostitute? Will society continue, as it has done for hundreds of years, to see prostitution in the negative and malign those who engage in it? Independent Institute research fellow, Wendy McElroy’s words seem particularly appropriate in this instance:
“Prostitution is not merely an exchange of sexual favors; it is a financial exchange. At this point, individualist feminists rise to defend the free market as well as a woman’s self-ownership. This is expressed by the question: ‘Prostitution is a combination of sex and the free market. Which one are you against?’”
Of course, I couldn’t help but jokingly accuse a bunch of ex-colleagues of writing At Any Price under a pen name, which lead to some hilarious back-and-forth about whether the hero performed at ‘a consistent 60fps per second’, if he ‘qualified as a Class A’ (for the non-nerds amongst you, that’s the worst type of bug you can get during development and, generally means that no one is getting any sleep for the foreseeable future) and this extremely witty parody from a good friend of mine who is married to an Executive Producer:
“As his fingers pumped the buttons of the controller her thoughts turned to what else those dexterous digits could do… the washing up, putting that picture on the wall that’s been lying around for 6 months, clearing out the garage. #reallifeofagamerswife”
Sexually speaking, At Any Price is relatively tame. But the story is more than interesting enough to carry things along. Some readers may find the coitus interruptus aspect a bit frustrating, but the good news is that although this book is the first of three about Mia and Adam, there’s no make-you-want-to-tear-your-hair-out cliff-hanger.
Tickle your fancy? Click on the following links to purchase a copy.
*Apologies for the lack of stick figures in this one, troops. My black ink pen has run dry and I’ve yet to buy a new one!
