Adults may have clumsy, fat hands (see the first quote – we’re not just saying that to insult ourselves), but children have some problems, too. For one thing, as Val makes clear here, no one takes children’s ideas seriously. Peter has a solution for that, which is to hide their ages online. What’s curious here is that children have problems, but they can find ways to get around those. Can the adults? Well, sure: they can manipulate and use the kids.

We tend to think of manipulation as a bad thing, but here Major Imbu (the computer specialist) is describing how the mind game is meant to mess around with students for the sake of their own happiness. That is, the mind game seems like therapy: it manipulates the children into working through some issues. Is this still manipulation?

Peter is the most manipulative of the Wiggin kids. Or is he? Maybe he’s merely the most open about it. Here he is, planning with Val about how they should manipulate the world. In this case, his form of manipulation will be almost entirely verbal. (By contrast, the school teachers try to manipulate Ender through a number of techniques, such as isolation.) Peter and Val are useful for us because they talk a lot about their plans for manipulation (so we can see exactly how they plan to do it); and also because they demonstrate that manipulation is not totally about Ender. (See also 9.37 and 9.63.)