Ready Player One

Ready Player One

This book may be most famous for the competition which was announced on its release: if you could solve the puzzle which had been incorporated into its pages, you could win a DeLorean.  Like the one from Back to the Future.  You remember Back to the Future, right?  It was from the 80s.  So many things happened in the 80s.  Here's a bunch of other things from the 80s!

If you enjoyed that paragraph, you'll probably enjoy Ready Player One.  If you didn't, well, you're probably a sane human being.

Ready Player One was written by Ernest Cline, a screenwriter, and interestingly enough the film rights were sold on the same day as the publishing deal, a fact that I will come back to later.  It tells the story of Wade Watts, a teenager living in Oklahoma City in the year 2044, in a time when energy crises have left the world poverty-stricken and mostly uninhabitable.  Instead, most people have retreated to the Oasis, an online virtual reality game that has absorbed and taken the place of the Internet.  Most of the story takes place inside the Oasis, where Wade (also known by his character name Parzival) is one of many players trying to track down an easter egg hidden within the programming by its deceased, eccentric programmer, James Halliday. The prize: ownership of his company, worth $240 billion.

At the outset of the novel, James Halliday has been dead for five years and no one has made any progress in the hunt for his easter egg.  Most of the players searching for it, known as egg hunters or "gunters" for short - a name I detest - have given it up as a lost cause, until Wade finally uncovers the first of the three keys necessary and reignites the world's interest in the hunt.  The plot of the novel follows the race between Wade, his friends, and an unambiguously evil faceless corporation to solve the various puzzles that lie between them and the easter egg.  It's hardly a ground-breaking storyline, but it is serviceable, and I can't complain too much about the structure.  What I will complain about, at length, is the content.

First of all is the character of Wade.  We are introduced to him as a character who nobody particularly likes, not even himself.  I imagine this is to set him up as a loveable underdog for his eventual rise to heroism, but instead it just made him unlikeable.  To exacerbate this, Wade is obsessive about his hunt for the egg, and it's here that my complaint at the beginning of the review comes in.

We are told that James Halliday grew up in the 80s and harbours a lot of nostalgia for that time.  Therefore, it is reasoned, in order to find his egg you will need to be an expert on 80s popular culture, especially video games, film, and music.  For a more subtle author this would be an opportunity to work in lots of sly references to various 80s icons.  Instead, Cline chooses to bludgeon us over the head with it, usually with Wade as his mouthpiece.  Rather than working the influences of the decade into the narrative, we are just treated to lists of Things That Are From The 80s.  For example, this is part of the description of Wade's friendship with his only friend and fellow egg hunter, who he knows only through the Oasis, called Aech:

"Sometimes we even conducted our research together.  This usually consisted of watching cheesy '80s movies and TV shows here in his chat room.  We also played a lot of videogames, of course.  Aech and I had wasted countless hours on two-player classics like Contra, Golden Axe, Heavy Barrel, Smash TV, and Ikari Warriors."

My eyes began to glaze over about two items in.  This isn't just bad novel writing, it's barely even worthy of BuzzFeed.

Not content with simply listing items, Wade also goes to lengths to tell us how often he's consumed this media.  This begins in the first chapter where he begins to watch an episode of Family Ties, and we are told that he has already watched "all 180 episodes, multiple times".  He's watched WarGames "over three dozen times", and when it comes to the author's favourite game, Black Tiger, Wade says "I'd studied the game until, like Halliday, I could reach the end on just one credit.  After that, I continued to play it every few months, just to keep from getting rusty."

There's also Wade's tendency to blurt out random trivia, particularly when it comes to music.  Obviously, music is a bit tricky to include in written media, so Cline's ingenious workaround is to have Wade list the track, the artist, and usually the year of release whenever he wants to include a soundtrack in the novel.  This was tiresome after the first time.

The other major problem is that most of the dramatic points in the story, where Wade is pushed to his limits, he's playing a video game.  I'm not talking about the Oasis itself here - generally the important points on Wade's quest involve some retro game inside the Oasis.  The issue is that reading about someone playing a video game is, unfortunately, pretty boring.  Not to mention the fact that many of the games that Cline chooses, being arcade games from the 80s, are very repetitive.  One moment in particular that stands out is Wade having to play a perfect game of PacMan.  I'm not going to say that it's impossible to make that exciting using the written word, but I will say that in this case Cline fell pretty far short.

There are some other relatively minor complaints I had with Ready Player One, including the rather fuzzy rules surrounding the operation of the Oasis which tend to veer between overall very vague and extremely specific on certain areas; and the slightly bizarre way the relationship between Wade and the love interest Art3mis is treated.  However, I think the real root of my dissatisfaction with the novel was that it's clearly been written in the wrong media.  Ready Player One is far more suited for film, where clever references can be slipped into the background rather than having to be spelled out, and the very visual medium of video games can be brought to life (although I have to admit that I am sceptical about how well that will really translate).  

Fortunately, as I said at the start, the film rights were sold on the same day as the book itself, and the film is under development, direct by Steven Spielberg and slated for release some time in 2017.  So, although I would not recommend this book to read, I will be looking forward to the film with some interest.