Two points for brushing your teeth. Ten points for keeping your room tidy. Seventy-two points for the Bioeconomic Game Design pop quiz on the ride to school in your personal FunCar. Another thirty for making every hurdle in gym class. Life is a game, unless you're not the one winning. Gabby DeCorte, top student and reality-hacker extraordinaire, has been doing whatever it takes to keep her best friend, Zaela, from falling behind in LifeGame. Zaela has gifts of artistry that amaze Gabby, but none of those skills translate in LifeGame and with final exams coming up, they can't afford to waste a single minute. But when a mysterious group called the Frags contacts Gabby claiming to know what really happens to the losers of LifeGame, she must choose between winning and what she believes in.

When the Frags escape to the Freelands, they find freedom has its own challenges. Without the familiar rules of LifeGame, Gabby and the Frags stumble from one dangerous Freeland to the next, while conflict in the group threatens to split them up. As the trail to Zaela becomes confused by the looming war, Gabby must reinvent herself or never see her best friend again.

When Gabby infiltrates the Southlands, reality becomes a dangerous game. Desperate to reach Zaela before war erupts, Gabby takes a chance that puts her life in peril. She asks the Coders to send her into the Southlands as a spy, a request she quickly regrets. Now she faces a new enemy, one that knows everything about her and exposes her weaknesses in a game for her life. But before she can win, Gabby must wrestle with old wounds and finally come to grips with the person she was meant to be.

Tibor Case longs to escape high school and move onto his real life, the one he knows will be infinitely better than his current one. His only relief from the drudgery of school comes when he escapes to Old Detroit to play games him and his best friend, William, created for their augmented reality shades. When Tibor stumbles upon a dead man in a dumpster with a high-tech system and decides he wants to see what's on it, he learns that life outside his small, little world has gotten stranger than the games he plays.