This week, it looks like adding “video game expert” to their LinkedIn profiles is finally going to pay off for Jake and Nog. But when they realize the fake games are hurting real people, they’ll have to decide if it’s worth all the shakes they can drink. Will this be the best or worst spring break ever? Is Jake’s back going to be okay? And does anyone even say “catsup” today, much less four hundred years from now? All this and more in Highest Score, the book that has a game for the grown-ups, too!

Highest Score
Author: Kem Antilles1Pseudonym for the husband/wife writing team of Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta, to whom the book is, amusingly, partially dedicated: “…without whom this book could never have  been written[.]” Bit of an understatement, that.
Pages: 118
Published: June 1996
Timeline: Between “Playing God” (S2E17) and “Profit and Loss” (S2E18)
Prerequisites: None

Often, Star Trek‘s YA novels aim for just one simple, humble goal: to entertain. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a lack of ambition. There’s a certain kind of wisdom in knowing one’s lane and staying in it. But every now and then, a Star Trek YA book emerges with as bold a vision of the future as any the mainline novels could muster. Highest Score is one such story. It dares to imagine a fantasy so outlandish that it could only begin to be plausible several centuries from now, a premise that would have made any reader of its day lose their mind laughing over how gauchely obvious it is in its total science-fictionality. And that fantasy premise is: getting paid to play video games.

It’s a little unfortunate that despite being only the eighth DS9 book for kids, Highest Score manages to cover previously trodden ground. It also doesn’t do it as well as its predecessor. In Arcade, the big video game was a secret test of character, but here, it’s more of a secret tool for evil, a more cynical outlook I couldn’t help but find a tad disheartening. It recalls the insecurity that countless adults of my youth projected onto video games (and later social media)—the insistence that they would rot our brains, much of it leveled at us by the very same people who, shortly after the turn of the millennium, would themselves succumb to the brainwashing of certain branches of the media that shall remain nameless. Arcade succeeded largely by strictly limiting its engagement with video games to use as a plot device, and Highest Score demonstrates the danger in venturing even a little bit outside that boundary without the proper expertise, which would give plenty of authors trouble even today, much less in 1996.

As in Arcade, Jake and Nog’s mAd GaMeR sKiLLz attract the notice of a visiting alien, this one an honestly kind of cool-looking bird-man-with-a-mohawk named Kwiltek. Kwiltek offers them a golden employment opportunity: he runs an automated mining consortium that extracts raw materials from dangerous and inhospitable planets. Despite having each independently limited their young charges’ gaming time to an hour a day just a handful of pages prior, Ben and Quark think Kwiltek’s proposition offers the boys an excellent chance to learn a thing or two about Grown-Up Responsibility™, and with a week-long vacation from school coming up, they allow them to take the job on a trial basis.

To keep from losing manpower to both hostile working conditions and tedium, Kwiltek gamifies the job by filtering the mining activity through a low-tech video game simulation where one member of a duo mans the excavator while the other picks off attacking fliers, with the day’s highest-scoring team receiving double wages. So it’s a bit like Ender’s Game, except with menial labor instead of war. And, just as in that book, there’s false pretense afoot. Jake sneaks a trip down to the cargo bay to see what they’re really mining, and when he and Nog get busted, they crawl through the ducts to the command level to talk to Kwiltek about it and subsequently find him and his bird buddies watching a scene of very realistic planetside violence. Kwiltek claims it’s a new simulation—far better graphics at a fraction of the cost—and asks them to keep what they’ve seen on the down-low. But Jake remains unassuaged and beams down to the surface to get the straight dope for himself.

There, he finds a group of defenseless natives and their avian pals struggling to fend off the relentless strip mining and gunning down of their comrades. Suddenly the games don’t seem so fun anymore as the weight of the implications hit Jake like a ton of bricks and he realizes he’s been killing real animals with his flyboy tactics and that the low-tech graphics of Kwiltek’s simulator have been covering up high-tech genocide. The natives, a small but lithe and muscular people, have little at their disposal to defend themselves with save for some natural-grown explosive gourds. Can Jake lead them to victory over Kwiltek and his invasive machinery?

Kevin J. Anderson and his wife Rebecca Moesta chose to publish Highest Score under a pseudonym to keep their real names from saturating bookstore shelves at the time. They are in fact quite prolific, particularly in that other diametrically opposite space-fiction universe—you know the one. Their largest body of work together is the Young Jedi Knights line of Star Wars junior novels, for which they penned all fourteen installments between 1995 and 1998. Seeing Anderson’s name in particular behind the alias was especially pleasing, since I have quite a bit of nostalgic fondness for a Star Wars series he spearheaded: the original trio of short story anthologies known as the Tales books,2Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina (July 1995), Tales from Jabba’s Palace (December 1995; also my personal favorite), and Tales of the Bounty Hunters (December 1996). There were also two Tales anthologies not edited by Anderson: Tales from the Empire (December 1997, ed. Peter Schweighofer) and Tales from the New Republic (December 1999, ed. Schweighofer and Craig Carey). The same general idea resurfaced in 2017 with From A Certain Point of View (ed. Gary Whitta), timed to celebrate the franchise’s 40th anniversary and featuring stories about background characters in A New Hope. An Empire Strikes Back follow-up (also edited by Whitta) came out in 2020. which he edited.

Although they profess to be lifelong fans of Star Trek in Voyages of Imagination,3Moesta says Anderson skipped a college class to go see The Motion Picture. I’m sure they were a lot more comfortable writing for that universe than this one. Still, this isn’t as dreadful as it could have been. I don’t really think the video game stuff works very well here, and the astonishment at the idea of getting paid to play video games is almost pitiably quaint, considering how far e-sports have come since then. Still, Highest Score does offer at least a couple of solid takeaways. It teaches kids to revolt against poor and/or immoral working conditions, and of course it’s no surprise that a book written in the 90s has a few things to say about environmental stewardship. But on the whole, it’s pretty unexciting and definitely missable. 

MVP & LVP

• MVP? It’s Jake, of course. It’s almost always Jake. Not always. But almost.
• My LVP this week is Rom. This is pre-awesome Rom, so character-wise, it makes sense, but until he grows a bit of a backbone, he’s such a nothingburger. Rom eventually became my favorite character in Deep Space Nine, but I definitely wouldn’t have guessed that he would during this era of the show.

Stray Bits

• Cover Art Corner: Okay, real talk: what in the nine circles of hell is going on with this perspective?
  
  Jake will be very lucky if he doesn’t walk away from this adventure with a wicked case of scoliosis. Also, he seems to be growing into a giant? Is the expression on his face communicating shock at that, or at the sudden urge he feels to unhinge his jaw and consume the small girl he is protecting whole? I know artists have to make these things seem exciting but good grief this is weird.
• This is pure coincidence, but I was mildly amused that a book about video games features a planet named Citra, which is also the name of an open-source 3DS emulator created in 2013.
• Should you somehow find yourself in the extremely unlikely position of being an adult who is reading this book (or has to): knock back a shot every time they refer to Nog as “the Ferengi boy”.
• Jake’s replicator order, p. 68: “One vegaburger, hot, catsup and mustard, no relish, no onions…” — Does anyone seriously use the word catsup anymore? I have always hated that word. There is literally no difference between the two, and ketchup sounds so much better. Incidentally, I will say I found the etymological speculation in that link fairly fascinating. Also, mark me down as not a fan of ketchup in general, although because most of what I don’t like about it is the cloying sweetness, one brand I really like on the few occasions that I do want some is Primal Kitchen’s unsweetened organic ketchup. Anyway, it’s nice to see someone ordering and unironically enjoying a veggie burger—pretty impressive considering their reputation 25 years ago (not without good reason), though Jake’s specification for no relish or onion indicates that despite coming from a rich culinary tradition, he is in fact not a big fan of flavor.

Final Assessment

Average. Definitely isn’t the garbage fire it could have been, and it does have a few noteworthy lessons about not taking bad working conditions sitting down and fighting for environmental responsibility and indigenous populations. On the not-so-great side, the idea of getting paid to play video games is treated with such astonishment that it’s honestly kind of laughable, and having it be in service of something so nakedly evil achieves a level of cynicism even I find a little off-putting. All in all, it’s one of those solidly in-the-middle, totally forgettable type of books that I’ll probably never think about again.

NEXT TIME: The crew of Voyager sings a spooky Cybersong