Ready Player One

In a dark dystopic future, people spend most their life in the virtual reality world of OASIS. Everything you’d want to do with other people can be (and mostly is) done in VR. Online gaming, education, business activity, even human relations.

And given that the world is the usual cyberpunk corpocratic hell, where megacorps have grabbed control of everything and re-introduced debt-slavery, most people live in squalor and have little better to do when they’re not working than embrace escapism in the form of OASIS.

Imagine then that the creator of OASIS was a true philanthropist, letting people use OASIS mostly for free, respecting people’s privacy, not terrorising people with ads or selling their personal data down the river, supporting free childcare and public education within OASIS.

Imagine further that this otherwise benevolent person on his deathbed flips the script on the world and puts it all at risk by offering up complete ownership and control of OASIS to anyone who wins a competition to be the biggest 80s pop culture nerd by solving a bunch of riddles in the game.

Predictably, the evil megacorps set out to win the price, so they can take over the world. Given OASIS’ pervasiveness, it would be a panopticon with total information control beyond even Mark Zuckerberg’s darkest dreams.

So the creator of OASIS decides to risk creating the worst hell imaginable, a planet-wide prison as insidious as the matrix, for reasons not quite explained. To get everyone excited about his favourite decade, the 80’s? Insanity? Extreme nihilism?

Hard to imagine someone otherwise benevolent would risk such a disastrous outcome for the world.

Of course, in the end, the “good guys” win, but only by a hairs breadth. A little less luck, and the bad guys would’ve won.

“Revenge of the Nerds” fanfic

If “Nerd high school revenge fantasy” was a genre, “Ready Player One” would fit right in. The main character is a high school and all the bad guys are described as jocks.

In one of his early triumphs, he humiliates a bully by being able to recite the most trivia about 80’s video games.

As someone who was a nerd in High School, I can understand how a teenager might indulge in such puerile fantasies, but considering that the author was in his late thirties when he wrote the book, my feelings of shame on his behalf are palpable.

The author himself is a huge 80s pop-culture buff, and most of the plot is set inside VR remakes of his favourite video games and movies, and no opportunity to name-drop his favourite authors and creators is missed, and finally, if you compare the fictional love interest to the author’s then-girlfriend, now-wife, there’s an eerie similarity.

All in all, this book strikes me as a lightly fictionalised narration of the author’s daydreams. Fascinating to a sociologist, but not particularly compelling fiction.

Aside from the protagonist and his love interest, all characters are cardboard cut-out stereotypes, straight from central casting. The villains are especially boring, lacking any sort of depth or character. Willing to cheat, kidnap, murder, anything to win, no conscience, no hesitation, no motivation other than money. Not true fans, just into 80s pop-culture for the money. Poseurs, in a word (a word that is used, unironically, several times in the book).

The silver lining

So while the plot suffers in the believability-department and the characters are generally paper-thin and uninteresting, the world-building is decent. Stereotypically cyberpunk, but still imaginative and interesting. I imagine it’d tug heavily on the nostalgia-heartstrings, if you were old enough to have experienced 80s pop culture. As I’m a dozen years younger than the author, I’m not deeply moved. I know of PacMan, Wargames and many of the other famous 80s games and cult-movies, but never spent much time playing or watching them, so I probably missed a bunch of easter-eggs and context, although the author is pretty heavy-handed with the explanatory exposition.

Still, the retro-futuristic setting is somewhat interesting and the VR setting allows a believable mix of sci-fi, nostalgia and magic. The parts of the plot occurring in the real world are much less believable, but mercifully short.

Bottom line, unless you really miss the 80s, there are better books out there.