The “fear” that Ender feels is because Bernard is gathering a gang of bullies while Ender has no one, not even Valentine, to protect him. Ender has often stood outside the mainstream (check Chapter 4, where Ender thinks about being like the other boys). But here that isolation comes with an additional cost: it’s not just about being lonely, but being vulnerable. Here’s an unexpected negative side effect to isolation – Ender has no friends to talk to, sure, but he also has no friends to watch his back.

Battle School has some video games in which the players compete against the computer, but most of the games – especially the really important ones – have the students compete against each other. Ender learns from watching the computer and from watching the students, but he only starts making a name for himself when he finally plays against the older boys.

This is Mick’s terrible advice to Ender. But there’s one thing that Mick gets right, which is that at the Battle School, you need to have a team – you need some friends to watch your back. (This is shown to be the case especially in the zero-gravity battleroom, where you need to have someone to push off against.) After all the talk about isolation and how it will help Ender be creative, it’s useful to hear someone forcefully make the opposite argument: Ender will need people.

In case we thought that Ender wouldn’t be any good at games, we get this reminder that um, yes, going to be quite good at games. (Here’s another hint: the book is called <em>Ender’s Game</em>, which is a title that really promises that Ender’s going to be OK at games.) But notice that this remark slips from talking about “the game” to talking about “the system.” What system is that? Is this thought about how Ender is pretty good at games or about how Ender has actually found a good place at the Battle School?

Ender gets a lot of attention in this book, so we can see pretty easily how he’s confined – there’s school, there’s the war, there are bullies, and family. All of those things limit Ender’s freedom. But what about the other characters? We have a good test case with Bernard: in order to preserve his freedom and happiness, Ender has to contain Bernard. It almost sounds as if there’s a limited quantity of freedom – the more Bernard has, the less Ender has; the less Bernard has, the more chance there is for other boys to be “free of him.”