While it wouldn’t make much sense to review a five-year-old video game, a five-year-old book about video games seems much more practical. We gamers follow the release schedule very closely. Game trailers get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views, official twitter channels are followed, and news site chomp up every press release. Books themed on video games are rare, and good ones are far rarer still.
I had only heard of Ready Player One this past month and realized that it, too, merited attention and review. After all, video gamers have long craved positive attention and limelight, and Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is a highly acclaimed title on the subject. I picked up the book and finished it in a single day, and while I was completely engrossed with it while I was reading it, the longer I think about it, the less I like it.
The 80’s stand-up arcade game Joust plays a key role early in the book.
Taking place in the year 2044, Ready Player One follows 17-year-old Wade Watts, a poor, orphaned high school student living in the economically devastated United States. The world has become a very different place following various wars, peak oil, famine, disease, and climate change, a true political left-wing nightmare scenario. Wade, like many people in the book, spends nearly all of his time in a virtual reality Internet called OASIS, immersed by advanced VR headgear and controlling gloves. There, he goes to high school, has a couple of friends and acquaintances who could live anywhere on the planet, and plays the most massive multiplayer game known to man. OASIS credits carry more weight than actual currency as most of mankind chooses to live the majority of their reality virtually.
The plot is set in motion by the death of the founder of OASIS James Halliday, who posthumously announced a massive Easter egg hunt inside of OASIS, with the prize being his fortune of hundreds of billions of dollars and the controlling stake of the company that owns OASIS. For five years everyone on the planet obsessively searches for the first key in the hunt, without a hint of progress being made. As most people give up and start to consider the mystery an elaborate hoax, Wade continues searching, eventually uncovering the beginning of the egg hunt and becoming and instant celebrity.
A Dungeons and Dragons encounter named Tomb of Horrors is faithfully recreated in OASIS.
The majority of the book follows this hunt, which incorporates nearly every level of geek culture in existence. Huge amounts of text are devoted to the 80s, with references like Pac-Man, Zork, Wargames, Joust, and Rush playing central roles, and so many more playing supporting roles. There is significant charm to Ready Player One, especially for those old enough or retro enough to understand even a fraction of the references. Being 32 years old myself, I knew I was in for a geek culture adventure ride when I read the early passphrase “You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada,” a reference to the 80’s movie The Last Starfighter, one of my family favorites growing up. The stack of references only grows from there. In a way, Ready Player One is the literary embodiment of a common juvenile fantasy, wherein the protagonist is talented in a very specific way, and those talents are called upon to save the world. Seeing it played out in fiction is quite satisfying in its own way.
The other half to the virtual world of Ready Player One is the unification of the most beloved factions of geekdom. With few limits to the possibilities in OASIS, Cline describes incredible encounters of ships from Star Trek, Firefly, Star Wars, Doctor Who, Halo, and dozens more, all flying about and interacting as so many people have seen only in their imaginations. The universe is littered with worlds containing entire rebuilt locations from Blade Runner, Dungeons and Dragons, and more, explored by the characters in loving detail. For anyone who has ever wished they could live in a fictional world for just an instant, Ready Player One provides a sprawling playground of limitless possibilities.
However, a story is more than just its setting, and that’s where Ready Player One breaks down. Cline appears to have written the book with only a stereotypical Redditor in mind, both as his protagonist and as the reader. Cline wastes no time in shoving his views on religion and politics down the reader’s throat in the first 10 pages. He tries to paint a picture of a world fallen into that left-wing nightmare, but clearly lacks the understanding of the complex issues to avoid creating an immersive world that would come from either a far better researched prognostication of potential modern catastrophes, or by simply making the novel take place in 2145 rather than 2045. As it’s written, the setting of Ready Player One reads like an episode of Captain Planet, with the cackling cartoon villains who want to destroy the planet having been the victors. Cities are randomly annihilated by nuclear weapons, oil has almost completely run out, global warming has destroyed much of the environment, travel by any means is nearly impossible, government secrets are available for purchase with only modest amounts of internet currency, and people care more about electing the Presidents of the Internet (Corry Doctorow and Wil Wheaton, as if the message of sucking up to Reddit wasn’t played up enough) than the President of the United States. While some of those are tangible contemporary problems, they’re handled so haphazardly that I am unable to take them seriously.
One of the more incredible concepts in Ready Player One is that the characters are inserted into old games like Tempest to play from a first person perspective.
As though to escape the problems of the real world, every character important to the plot spends most of their time, if not nearly all of it, connected to OASIS. Wade Watts in particular spends the majority of the book becoming more and more dependent on the OASIS, regressing from the real world. I found him to be quite an unlikable character. He starts out as a stereotypical introverted and unattractive geek who is beyond obsessed with video games and only gets worse as the book progresses. Wade shuts out reality to as far an extent as he is able, rarely actually speaking with another human being. He has few friends, and those he has are just as obsessed as he is. He’s smug and arrogant while simultaneously being insecure and pathetic. He spends most of his time on the egg hunt, memorizing dozens 80’s movies and mastering every 80’s video game, but somehow graduates high school while becoming an expert hacker, with no explanation as to where his skills and time to master them actually come from. Wade’s only redemption from his personality comes from a clumsily tacked on Aesop of “Hey, maybe go outside once in a while” at the very end, which does little to convince the reader that balance between reality and virtual reality are actually important to Wade. Additionally, the heroes of Ready Player One are all inexplicably brilliant teenagers and one adult mentor, with every other adult either being a villain or an ignorant bystander.
Perhaps the reason why I enjoyed Ready Player One so much while reading it and much less so in the time since then is because the true enjoyment comes from spending time in that fantasy. It is utterly enjoyable to ride alongside hundreds of video game style characters from all walks of geekdom uniting in a fierce all-for-one battle against an imposing and vicious antagonizing force, or to feel like you are descending into a dark cavern from an RPG with very real threats around every corner, or that you are racing against time to solve a mystery that could very well affect the fate of the world. However, once all that’s over, the flaws that were concealed by excitement are the bitter aftertaste.
If you are the kind of person that this book seems to have been written directly for, you will probably love Ready Player One. However, the farther away from that narrow circle you happen to fall, the less you will probably enjoy it. If you don’t agree with the general opinion of Reddit and don’t particularly like 80’s movies, TV, or video games in general, you probably won’t like Ready Player One at all. For myself, I’m stuck in a juxtaposition of loving it and being incredibly annoyed by it. It is a gripping story though, and I’d recommend it to those with more than a mere passing interest in the categories it touches.
