4 ideas
Twelve-year-old Johnny Maxwell, playing a pirated space shooter called Only You Can Save Mankind, receives a message from the alien ScreeWee Captain: 'We wish to talk. We surrender.' The aliens then vanish from every copy of the game. In his dreams Johnny enters the game and escorts the fleet home across the galaxy, while other players, including Kirsty, a hyper-competitive girl, keep hunting the ScreeWee as targets.
The novel sets the game against 1991 Gulf War television coverage, where missile strikes appeared as crosshair footage that looked like a video game. When violence is mediated through a screen and a scoring system, the people on the other end stop being perceived as beings who can suffer or surrender. They register only as points to be cleared.
Once an enemy surrenders to you, you become responsible for its safety, even when the rules of the system you are in give you no way to recognize the surrender. Johnny cannot stop protecting the ScreeWee after they ask for mercy, although nobody else believes the aliens are real.
The ScreeWee fight because the game's code requires them to, and they are as trapped in its logic as the player is. Johnny's refusal to play the role he was assigned, while his parents' marriage falls apart around him, shows that the only way out of a scripted conflict is for one participant to stop following the script.