Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Now a major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg. “Enchanting . . . Willy Wonka meets The Matrix.”—USA Today • “As one adventure leads expertly to the next, time simply evaporates.”—Entertainment Weekly A world at stake. A quest for the ultimate prize. Are you ready? In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time Wade Watts really feels alive is when he’s jacked into the OASIS, a vast virtual world where most of humanity spends their days. When the eccentric creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a series of fiendish puzzles, based on his obsession with the pop culture of decades past. Whoever is first to solve them will inherit his vast fortune—and control of the OASIS itself. Then Wade cracks the first clue. Suddenly he’s beset by rivals who’ll kill to take this prize. The race is on—and the only way to survive is to win. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Entertainment Weekly • San Francisco Chronicle • Village Voice • Chicago Sun-Times • iO9 • The AV Club “Delightful . . . the grown-up’s Harry Potter.”—HuffPost “An addictive read . . . part intergalactic scavenger hunt, part romance, and all heart.”—CNN “A most excellent ride . . . Cline stuffs his novel with a cornucopia of pop culture, as if to wink to the reader.”—Boston Globe “Ridiculously fun and large-hearted . . . Cline is that rare writer who can translate his own dorky enthusiasms into prose that’s both hilarious and compassionate.”—NPR “[A] fantastic page-turner . . . starts out like a simple bit of fun and winds up feeling like a rich and plausible picture of future friendships in a world not too distant from our own.”—iO9

The story is good. It's compelling and suspenseful and fun. Sure it may have some small holes, but nothing you'll fall through and hurt yourself. But the world is magnificent. Especially to anyone who ever played video games, watched TV and movies or listened to music in and around the 1980s. This book is glorious.

I want to start off by saying that I get why people would love this book, and there were a bunch of moments in it that were fun. I'm in the demographic that's the prime target for the book (“geeky dude that was alive in the 1980s”) and on a surface level it was a fun trip down memory lane.

Under the surface, though, the story becomes a little disappointing. The main character, Wade, seems really underdeveloped and unremarkable, with little personality beyond “good at videogames”. Despite being such a cypher, though, the other characters in the story idealize him. The villains are similarly shallow. The justification for them being villainous is originally “they're a corporation and try to play the game strategically”, but then they're suddenly murdering dozens of innocent people. The story would have been a lot stronger had its characters been more developed and more fully realized.

This continues with the way that Ready Player One relates to its main theme of nostalgia. Nostalgia – specifically early-to-mid-80s nostalgia for mainstream pop music, video games, and movies – permeates every aspect of the story and the characters' lives. On the surface this might seem fun, especially for the target audience of the book. The problem is, however, that it's a story in which nostalgia and culture have become corrupted. The characters aren't nostalgic for the reasons that people in real life become nostalgic for stuff – because they're wishing for a return to a more carefree time, or because of personal, emotional links to the material. Instead, they're nostalgic for the 80s, a culture that they never experienced or encountered, because Halliday was nostalgic for the 80s. The rich old man has warped society into this cargo cult that worships the trinkets of his youth to the disservice of all else. There's no evidence of any culture existing in the world of Ready Player One beyond 2002 – just slavish observance to the things that Halliday loved. Halliday has an absolutely abusive relationship to the culture of the OASIS, and it's unfortunate that the book doesn't make any attempt to critique or analyze that relationship.

I think the last video game I played all the way through was Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders on the Commodore 64, so I wasn't up on all the video game nerdery, but mostly this was right up my alley. It was a very quick, very light read, but fun.

Really fun, quick read.

It also reminded me that even 80s geeks can have wildly different expertise in different sub-genres...

One of the first puzzles to get solved was something about Dungeons and Dragons that felt so esoteric to me that I almost lost interest in the book, thinking “These are not the 1980s references you were looking for.”

Later, I was rewarded with a clue that should have been so obvious to anyone who played text adventures. But, bafflingly, the clue was so challenging to the general population of players in the book that this puzzle went unsolved by any character for a significant length of time in the book.