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.