Ready Player One Book Review

I recently finished reading Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, and despite being a light read (I finished it in less than a week), I have a lot of thoughts on it. This review isn’t so much a commentary on the quality of the novel so much as an analysis of some of the ideas presented in the novel and where I feel those ideas fall short. I fear this review will make it seem as though I have an overwhelmingly negative opinion on the book so let me just say off the top that it was a thoroughly enjoyable read despite several issues and I’d recommend it to just about any geek out there. With that out of the way let’s dive into it.

Ready Player One is a YA novel set in a near-future sci-fi dystopia (around the year 2044). An energy crisis combined with severe climate change has set off a domino effect of catastrophes that have pushed humanity to the brink of collapse. The daily lives of most people on the planet is one of constant drudgery and suffering with only a select few of the wealthiest citizens enjoying a decent standard of living. To escape this miserable existence the majority of humanity plugs into a hyper-realistic, massive virtual world called the OASIS. It originally began as a VR MMO videogame, but it evolved overtime to encompass almost everything. In the OASIS you can play any game, watch any movie, listen to any song, shop, socialize, exercise (with the right peripherals), travel to distant or fictional locales, or even go to school. A person can spend the vast majority of their time in the OASIS, only needing to unplug to eat and sleep.

The story begins when the lead architect of this world, James Halliday, dies without heir so he creates a maddening scavenger hunt within the OASIS. Whoever completes it first will inherit his vast wealth and control of the OASIS. Needless to say, many people the world over get caught up in the hunt including our hero, Wade Watts (known online as Parzival), a sad, lonely, geeky teenager living in poverty. While most of his competitors are individuals like him (including his only friend, Aech, and his eventual love interest, Art3mis), the real threat comes from an evil multinational corporation called IOI; an ISP and media company with vast resources and no ethics. IOI employs an army of people to win the contest in their name so they can take control of the OASIS and milk it for every penny, turning it into a world that only the wealthy can enjoy much like the real one. So Wade and friends must solve the clues, complete the challenges, and reach the end before IOI does or they’ll lose the only thing they have left that brings them joy.

With that summary out of the way, lets get into the meat of it. Overall, I’d say Cline has laid the groundwork for a very cool (albeit depressing) world. The OASIS is especially appealing to the gamer in me, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to see something like it brought to fruition in reality. Of greater interest perhaps, is the near-future dystopic setting which allows Cline to draw on the issues of today and predict where they might lead us in the future. Economic inequality, corporate monopolies, environmental collapse, and the rise of the celebrity politician are already taking us down a very dark path. Its not difficult to see how these problems could lead us into a world not unlike the one presented in the novel. However, Cline doesn’t dwell on these ideas for too long, sometimes only mentioning them in passing. The only contemporary issue to take center stage, and indeed the only social issue nerds seem to get passionate about, is net neutrality (more on that later). Otherwise, Cline seems more or less content to let these themes fall by the wayside or just sit in the background after he’s done explaining them.

This segues into my next point, and perhaps the biggest technical issue I have with Ready Player One: endless exposition. Evidently Cline never got the memo on showing versus telling because he devotes a maddening amount of space to explaining his world and all the nitty-gritty elements within it. Now, to be fair, some exposition is absolutely necessary in any story, and that’s especially true when building a fantasy or science-fiction universe, but at some point you have to let that universe breathe. You don’t need to explain every little quirk of the OASIS or provide a Wikipedia article on every notable person or event mentioned. Just lay the groundwork, let the characters explore the world, allow the story to unfold naturally, and believe in the reader’s ability to fill in the blanks.

Of course the question of “the reader” presents another problem that compounds the issue of over-exposition since this book is simultaneously directed at two audiences. Cline uses a framing device to tell his story. Ostensibly, Ready Player One was written by Wade after the events depicted in it have already occurred as his attempt to “set the record straight” so to speak. As such, he goes into great detail explaining cultural references from our era for the benefit of his fictional audience, information that the actual readers are already familiar with. Conversely, much space needs to be devoted to explaining things from the future era unfamiliar to us, information that the fictional audience presumably already knows. This all adds to up to a lot of unnecessary exposition and a rather bizarre read at times as the book jumps between audiences.

All this exposition comes at the expense of themes, characters, and story. For instance, at one point Wade has a big falling out with his best friend, Aech. In most works this would be a major turning point and would serve as an emotional climax for the protagonist. In Ready Player One,  its only brought up in passing well after the fact as a sort of minor inconvenience for Wade now that he can’t bounce ideas off of him anymore. At another point, Wade goes on an adventure with two Japanese competitors, Daito and Shoto, wherein they fight giant monsters from Ultraman. This would be the perfect opportunity to both have a fun action sequence, and explore Daito and Shoto’s character who otherwise barely rise above stereotypes. Instead what we get is a complete rundown on the specs of Wade’s VR setup. That sort of information only has appeal to a limited group of tech enthusiasts. Granted, they probably make up a sizable portion of the book’s audience, and indeed in many ways this book is geared towards such futurists as I shall now outline.

On the surface this book seems to be about a group of scrappy nerds taking on a giant conglomerate for the future of the OASIS (which is essentially the Internet), but if you look a bit deeper you’ll see a third party at play. The OASIS doesn’t exist on its own, it was created by a tech/gaming company called GSS which was founded by Halliday and his best friend, Ogden Morrow. The duo are compared to Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs respectively, and both are presented as being champions of privacy and consumer rights. Their motives are benign or even humanist, and this is where I feel this book starts to date itself, moreso than with any pop culture reference.

Ready Player One was published in 2011, and its clear to me that Cline very much subscribes to the view popular at the time that silicon valley companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple were the shining beacon on the hill that would redeem humanity and usher in a new era of enlightenment. Now we know that is not the case, and this idea strikes me as quaint. Their corporate practices are just as shady as any other, if not worse in some cases (especially when it comes to privacy), and its debatable whether the effect they have on human psychology or society is beneficial. In the context of the book, GSS isn’t just one of these companies. Its all of them all rolled into one: Apple, Facebook, Valve, Amazon, Blizzard, Netflix, Google, and then some. The idea that GSS created a virtual world that is used by almost everyone, is practically free for the average user, guarantees complete anonymity and privacy, and even provides a free education for those who want it to boot just seems far too good to be true.

Still, GSS, in the form of Morrow, takes the side of Wade and friends in the battle against IOI which seems to perfectly mirror the net neutrality debate raging today wherein Comcast, TimeWarner, and friends are pitted against the aforementioned tech giants and an army of internet users. In this case, the position of the tech giants is in line with consumer interests, but its foolish to believe they’re doing it because they care about us. For both Comcast and Netflix it all comes down to money. Some tech companies might care about protecting users and their privacy, but they seem to be the exception rather than the norm.

There is also a dark side to the anonymity many of these web companies provide which has come to the fore in the wake of Trump’s election. It has become abundantly clear that the Internet has many dark corners and the people who hide in them are hardly harmless. If we’ve learned anything from Twitter, Reddit, and 4Chan in the past couple years its that a lot of these people are geeks and gamers, the very same people we’re supposed to take for heroes in Ready Play One. To be fair, Cline does introduce some trolls, but they’re presented as mere greifers, a minor nuisance more than anything. If he were to write this book today post-gamergate, I feel he’d have to address these issues in a more substantial way. Questions like,” Where do the Nazis live in the OASIS?” would need to be answered.

Cline’s naïve attitude about how beneficial the Internet is to society can be seen most blatantly with the reveal that Aech is in fact a black woman, and not a white man as Wade had thought. Aech gives a long speech about what a boon the OASIS had been to people of color, allowing them more opportunities thanks to the anonymity it provides. Its genuinely presented as a solution to racism, but hopefully I don’t have to explain how it fundamentally is not. At best it just puts a mask on the problem. Wouldn’t it be great if we could all just be white dudes all the time? That would solve everything!

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Cline’s ode to gamers is Wade’s treatment of Art3mis. He develops a crush on her before they even meet just by reading her blog. After they do finally meet (in the OASIS, not in person), his fixation with her morphs into an obsession. He pursues her relentlessly even after she severs all communication with him. Eventually, he manages to learn where she lives and what she looks like in reality (though to be fair, he does this mostly inadvertently) which is understandably quite upsetting to her. Its all very disturbing to say the least, and you don’t need to read the cover to know that a man wrote this book. It bears mentioning that Wade is aware of how creepy his behaviour is to some degree, but in the end he’s vindicated when she reciprocates his feelings. There appears to a shocking lack of awareness of what its like to be a women in society, nevermind on the Internet. There isn’t a doubt in my mind, that Art3mis contends with an unending stream of dick pics, rape threats, sexist jokes, and online stalkers on a daily basis. What makes Wade any different from the rest of them?

The world of Ready Player One has a lot of potential and its not surprising that Cline is working on a sequel (creatively titled Ready Player Two). I have high hopes for this next novel and that Cline will take the lessons of the past couple years to heart. The biggest obstacle he needs to overcome is his greater interest in the world he’s created over the characters and stories that inhabit it. I think a great start would be to make Art3mis the central character in the sequel as she is the one most interested in saving the world, and perhaps has a far greater understanding of the dangers of the OASIS than Wade ever possibly could. There are some heady ideas at play in Ready Player One, and Cline has the opportunity to address some of the biggest problems of our time in a fun and interesting way if he’d only take the leap.

Love.com Review and Analysis

Recently I sat down to watch something on Netflix and stumbled across a strange movie I’d never heard of called Love.com. I soon learned the reason why I’d never heard of it was because it’s from Brazil. The basic premise of the film is that a fashion vlogger and a video game vlogger fall in love. It’s your classic opposites attract rom-com story and mostly follows the same basic structure of guy gets girl, guy loses girl, guy gets girl back with a few superficial differences.

Now at this point some of you are probably asking why the hell I watched some rote Brazilian romantic comedy, and there are many possible answers. Perhaps I was looking for the Netflix series, Love, and watched this by mistake. Maybe the idea of a geek getting together with a beautiful woman held a perverse appeal for me. Or it could be that I’m secretly a sucker for a cheesy love story. But the reason I’m going with is that I have an anthropological interest in how other cultures approach genre fiction in the Information Era. Yep, that’s definitely the reason. As a result this will be less of a review and more of an analysis of different thematic elements in the film and how it plays with the various tropes and trappings of the genre.

Cheek Kissing

Characters in this movie always kiss each other on both cheeks when greeting one another. I know this has nothing to do with anything, but for some reason I always thought this practice was exclusive to European countries that speak romance languages. I have no clue why I didn’t think that they’d import it with them upon colonization, but there you go. It was a real eye-opener for me.

Geek Culture

Like most American writers, it turns out that Brazilian writers also don’t seem to know what geek culture actually is or how nerds interact with one another. The male lead exhibits all the common tropes: he lives with his mom, his bedroom is filled with comic books and action figures from floor to ceiling, he loses his goddamn mind over video games (thanks for that new stereotype, Pewdiepie), and of course he’s naturally a l33t hacker. Oh yeah, you better believe this movie has a hacking sequence and its as dumb as anything you see on CSI. I’m not even going to bother with the details of it.

Perhaps the best example of how this movie doesn’t get it is a scene where the male lead (Fernando) and his friends go to a cosplay party along with the female lead (Katrina) and her sister. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, that’s when a bunch of geeks go to a nightclub dressed as characters from movies, comic books, TV, or video games. I’ll admit, I’d never heard of this practice, probably because I’ve never really cosplayed, but it seems like something that we’d do. I’m guessing the writers are in the same boat I’m in, but with even less of a clue of what might actually happen at such an event. Fernando and company go in dressed as… I honestly have no idea. They wear brown robes and random masks and don’t look like anything. The patrons without speaking lines dress as recognizable characters, but nobody else does. All the food and beverages have geek themed names, which I’ll be honest is a thing that absolutely would happen. There’s music and people swaying around awkwardly because nerds don’t dance obviously, I guess. Since dancing isn’t a thing, the main form of entertainment at this “party” seems to be a stage where people impotently wave lightsabers at one another. That sure is…something… that nobody over the age of ten would consider a fun way to spend the night. Then Katrina shows up dressed as what the movie assure us is a zombie, Fernando admits that he’s turned on by it, and then they laugh and make out. So I guess that makes him a necrophiliac and she’s totally on board on with it. Nerds, amirite!

The only thing the movie comes close to getting right, though I feel this was mostly accidental, is how geeks tend to handle romance in a decidedly childish ways. That being said, I have plenty of geeky friends who are perfectly capable of dealing with relation-ships in an adult manner. Then I go online and lose much faith in my kind, and I see these attitudes reflected in Fernando. He makes no attempt to cross the bridge into Katrina’s world despite her repeated attempts to cross into his (as seen above). He also doesn’t seem to respect what she does for a living and views her as a frivolous and vain woman. He also does a number of other immature things that I’ll get into later, but suffice to say he’s not the most understanding character. Whether he was written like this in an attempt to be realistic, or just to move the plot along I’m not entirely certain.

Girl Gets Guy

By now you can probably gather that Katrina is the star of this show, and indeed she’s the one who moves the story forward. As the sub-header suggests, this is the first and arguably most important inversion of the classic formula. She is the one who chases after Fernando, kisses him, initiates a romantic relationship, and is the driving force behind it. She is the active agent in this movie and that’s reflected  in her characterization. While Fernando is in many ways portrayed as a stereotypical nerd, Katrina’s fashionista is significantly more nuanced which I found to be quite refreshing since most Hollywood films tend to go the easy route. She is not presented as being frivolous, vain, or loose, but is instead shown to be kind, smart, charismatic, and open-minded.  Her focus on self-image is motivated by ambition not narcissism; she’s using her vlog as a ladder to climb into the fashion industry and fulfill her dream of becoming a designer. Thus far she seems to have been quite successful at it having racked up multiple sponsors, a devoted following, and a swanky pad. Fernando’s life is dismal in comparison even if he is happy with it. So what on Earth does Katrina see in him? As we shall soon learn, even the movie seems to have trouble answering this question.

Relationship Montage

After they hook up for the first time we are treated to a classic “the relationship progresses” montage. While most movies do this by showing them going out on dates, cracking jokes, moving in together, meeting friends and family, or having sexual misadventures (ostensibly with the purpose of demonstrating the chemistry between the leads), Love.com takes a different route. Instead we see Fernando and Katrina laughing about nothing before making out. This is then repeated approximately five to ten times in slightly different settings. I have thought of two possible reasons for this: 1. This is how healthy, normal relationships are commonly portrayed in Brazilian culture. 2. The filmmakers had no clue what a relationship between two such polar opposites would actually look like and so resorted to just having them suck face for a few minutes. I’ll let you decide which one you think it is.

Guy Loses Girl

I’ll admit, I may have been a little too hard on Fernando up until now. By no means is he a bad guy. He’s generally rather sweet, is clearly intelligent, and is quite handsome for a geek. However, that does not excuse him from the general disdain he holds for Katrina’s lifestyle, a disdain which precipitates the inevitable breakup where the film adheres most strongly to the rom-com formula.

The inciting incident is when Fernando takes a picture of her without permission while she is sleeping and posts it online. It should be noted that Katrina broke up with her previous boyfriend for pretty much the exact same reason, and Fernando is well aware of this. Plus, does he really need to be told that its creepy to do that? Katrina is obviously incensed, partly because she makes her living off of looking her best and nobody looks their best in the morning before they wake up, and partly because she loses a sponsorship deal as a result of a rival product being visible in the picture. Fernando counters that such petty concerns as her career don’t really matter leading to an explosive argument that begets more creepy behaviour on Fernando’s part, begetting more arguments, and finally the split.

Now I suppose the movie is trying to make the point that Katrina is fixated on her career and online image at the expense of her real life relationships (her only confidante appears to be her sister), but its hard to see her as anything other than the offended party in this situation. For all her strengths, perhaps Katrina’s flaws could have used a little more attention in the same way that the reverse is true for Fernando.

Girl Inexplicably Takes Guy Back

With the split out of the way, the movie now needs to find an excuse to bring them back together, and this is where the film’s inability to justify their romance comes to the fore. While I am very much invested in Katrina and to a lesser degree invested in Fernando, I just don’t care all that much about their relationship. There just doesn’t seem to be any real chemistry between their characters. The only reason we’re given for Katrina’s affection towards Fernando is that he helped her out one time by hacking away those compromising pictures (maybe he has a good penis?). He seems to love her simply because she’s hot. Its just not enough for me to care if they get back together, and the haphazard and sudden way they do pull it off doesn’t help matters much.

In brief, Katrina coincidentally overhears a conversation between people she’d been hoping to work with, learning that the recent advancements she thought she’d made in her career were illusory. For some reason this prompts her to make an “inspirational” video about being yourself. Fernando sees this and for some reason this inspires him to work harder at his vlogging career to win her back. He has some success with his career, but not so much in his attempts to contact her. He sends her a video that presumably expresses his feelings, but she ignores it. Luckily it just so happens that his friend and Katrina’s sister have randomly been set up on a blind date and the leads are both roped into coming in case it goes south. They unexpectedly and awkwardly meet with Fernando stating that he feels the video was made for him. Katrina replies that it wasn’t (no shit) and its made clear that although she is heartbroken she has made the decision to move on, and to that effect is going to Milan to study for a few years. She leaves, but then decides to watch his video which proves to be what I presumed. This somehow succeeds in winning her over, he runs up and asks to go to Milan with her, they kiss, the credits roll.

The point of this not at all brief summary is to demonstrate how random and forced their reunion is, although to be fair this is far from the only rom-com to take this route. The main difference is that I can’t suspend my disbelief to conclude that these characters would or should get back together based on what’s been presented. Nothing about it feels natural to me. Perhaps this is simply because of my misunderstanding of Brazilian culture, but it may also be rooted in the movie’s use of technology and social media to bring the lovers together. The video Fernando sends to Katrina is Love.com’s equivalent of the Grand Gesture of Reconciliation seen in many other rom-coms, updated for the 21^st century. Perhaps I’m just old, but this gesture seems to fall short and comes off as lame and uninspired. Why should this video change Katrina’s mind and cause her to re-evaluate their affair? In the end this Beauty and the Geek fantasy appears to be just that.

Wait, You Forgot the Comedy

You may have noticed that this analysis has focused almost exclusively on the romantic half of the romantic-comedy genre, but have no fear, I haven’t forgotten the comedy half, although I can’t say the same for this movie. To be fair, comedy is notoriously difficult to translate so I’ll give Love.com some benefit of the doubt and assume most of the jokes went over my head. The only character with any funny lines that I could glean is Fernando’s friend, Panda, who you can tell exists for comic relief because his name is fucking Panda. Oddly enough, Fernando also has a friend who’s an aspiring stand-up comic, but who never gets to tell any jokes insofar as I can tell.

Situational comedy has an easier time crossing the language barrier as anyone can feel the pain and awkwardness of having your mom walk in on you as you’re about to get it on, and this movie mines that particular comedy gold on two separate occasions. I can only assume that this is an all too common occurrence in Brazil. I will admit, that the first time it happens and the mom hurriedly leaves then re-enters to introduce herself was the funniest moment in the movie. Otherwise, there’s a mildly amusing scene where Katrina barges into a men’s locker room to confront her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend over the aforementioned photos, but that’s about it for humour. This film was much more concerned with the first half of the “romantic comedy”, which can perhaps be traced back to the popularity of the telenovela which tend to be light on (intentional) laughs.

Final Thoughts

As you can probably gather, by no means do I consider this film to be good, but its not terrible either. Its kind of fun in its own guilty pleasure sort of way, and the female lead is stronger than average for the genre. My enjoyment was primarily hampered by a general lack of understanding of geekdom, though Hollywood is just as if not more culpable of the same crime. Coincidentally (or maybe not), the movie romance is mirrored in the real life relationship of Felix Kjellberg (aka Pewdiepie, a video game vlogger) and his girlfriend, Marzia Bisognin (a fashion vlogger).