Children are trained for a war through games, and the games are the war.
What makes it work is the isolation. Every time Ender adapts, the adults change the rules specifically so he cannot rest, and the book is honest that this is the deliberate manufacture of a person who will do what is required.
The battle room still reads well. The political subplot with the siblings posting under false names on the networks is the part that has aged strangest, in that it was wrong about everything except the mechanism.
Read April 1999.
