Ready Player One is, far and away, the worst book I have ever read. It fails on all fronts: it has no sense of character, no control of tone, bland prose; the world it builds is unimaginative and derivative, the plot is almost non-existent, and the few good ideas it might have had are buried far below the utter garbage heap that is this novel.I'm sure most of what I say here will have been said before. The film adaption of RP1 is slated to come out at the end of this month, and its critics have only gotten more numerous as the wider culture has become aware of the original novel. I am here only to confirm their findings--every bad thing you have heard about this book is true, and it is more embarrassing and boring to read through than you might imagine.
Originally, I did not intent to read RP1 at all. I have a plethora of other books I want to get through, and I'd heard enough about it to know I wasn't interested. However, I took a long car trip with a few coworkers recently, and their choice of audiobook turned out to be Ready Player One. The experience, at the very least, gave me something to do as I watched the scenery pass us by, and I tried to digest everything I was hearing.
For those who do not know, Ready Player One is a science fiction novel whose main gimmick is that it is full of pop-cultural references; to the point where it is almost nothing but pop-culture references. We follow an 18-year-old boy named Wade Watts, who lives in a dystopian future where most day-to-day activities take place in a virtual-reality video game called 'The OASIS.' Education, business, and vocation all take place in The OASIS, which is a dream-like paradise that serves as the only escape Wade has from the dreary reality around him. The plot starts when the OASIS's creator, a billionaire by the name of James Halliday, dies, willing his fortune and control of the OASIS to the first person who can find the 'Easter egg' he has hidden somewhere deep in the game world. He leaves behind a series of clues and challenges for the inhabitants of the OASIS, and it is this trail that Wade must follow in order to achieve fame and fortune.
The execution of the resulting story is a series of slow, meandering scenes that consist mostly of Wade reciting lists of all the pop-culture he has consumed in order to get into Halliday's mind and decipher his various riddles. It is the most uninteresting use of reference possible. Instead of merely alluding to certain movies or games or songs, etc., or incorporating them into cleaver puzzles or diving into the reasons for why Wade and Halliday are so invested in the art they love, the author, Ernest Cline, plays a one-player game of trivia-night. The challenges Wade faces are mostly video games within the OASIS--two degrees too far removed from reality for any real stakes to emerge--and the 'riddles' he must solve are so specific and obscure that the reader has no chance of guessing their solution. This removes any tension or payoff from the mysteries that surround each step in Wade's journey.
The most egregious example is Wade's conquest of the first of three 'gates' on Halliday's quest. Wade finds himself in a simulation of the movie War Games, in the place of its main character, and to complete this stage of the quest he must simply... recite each line of dialogue in the movie. He happens to have it memorized, because he knew Halliday was a huge fan of it, and so he is able to pass. There is no tension in this situation. No stakes if he loses (he can just try again). Watching Wade recite War Games is less interesting than reading its Wikipedia article. In that situation, at least, I might learn some interesting factoid about the film. As presented, it is simply Cline's statement that "I saw this movie you guys. Look at how I was able to remember this movie I've seen a few times and can also google." It is a baffling, agonizing scene--but so are most of the others in this book.
The reason for all this focus on banal minutia is, we are told, because Halliday was a huge fan of 80s and 90s pop-culture, and so designed his quests around references to the things he loved from his childhood. He wants for everyone to love those things as well, and used his fortune as incentive to force those desperate for an easy life to memorize and consume all of the media he was fond of. The world Halliday inhabits is repeatedly described as a miserable dystopia, but not once is it brought up that the man's fortune might have been better spent on improving the lives of others. Sure, he offers some free education to the masses, but it is in the OASIS, and he is never shown to be consciences of how his power might better humanity or alleviate the world's woes. Instead he locks it all away, dangling a carrot in front of his loyal players so they might think and love exactly like he does.
There is a disgustingly objectivist undertone to Halliday's character, but I have neither the time, experience, nor desire to dissect it completely. What I do wish to talk about, and what perhaps hasn't been too thoroughly eviscerated, is the design of the OASIS itself.
You would think that, at the very least, Ernest Cline might have a few good ideas about video games, judging by how many he has played (or at least heard of), but no. The OASIS is perhaps just as boring a video game as RP1 is a book. It is ostensibly an MMORPG, but for all intents and purposes it doesn't seem to be about anything. There are generic fantasy classes (wizards, knights, etc.), but there is hardly any setting beyond those details. The worlds we visit are all either generic (there is a school planet with nothing but schools) or made of references (there is a Star Wars planet/sector, a Firefly sector, etc.). Many of the worlds, we are told, were programmed not by the OASIS developers, but by third-parties who wanted to put them into the game. OASIS, as far as I can tell, seems to be closer to Garry'sMod with a class system than anything else. Which is fine, but we are given no reason why this particular freeware sandbox came to so thoroughly dominate the world, and there are several design choices that make this situation even more unbelievable.
For one, you have to expend in-game currency (which is the same as real-world currency, apparently) to use the 'teleporters' that instantly transmit you from one world to the next. Otherwise you must take some form of in-game transportation to get where you want to go, limited, of course, by a maximum speed and the size of the OASIS universe. This is garbage and nonsensical game design. Why is fast-travel paygated? Why is there a travel time between worlds? That would be like having to wait an hour to load up Facebook because you live an hour away from where its servers are hosted. That's not how that works in real life. That's not how load times work. What kind of idiot designs a video game like that? What kind of idiots pay money to use that system? What moronic world makes it the most popular video game in history, so much so that it replaces the Internet and the real economy?
The fact that the OASIS is a video game and a VR sim has some impact within the narrative, but there is so little detail offered about what exactly it is supposed to be that it might as well be anything. There is no gameplay loop, no evidence of world-building within the OASIS, no detail about what the differences between character classes actually are, and no structure to inform what is and isn't possible. We are given nothing but a few arbitrary rules, and new ones are introduced on the fly as they become convenient for the plot. Things just happen because they can, apparently. But in a world of endless possibilities, why can't Wade simply wish away his problems? Why does everyone have to play by the OASIS's rules? Why haven't people scoured through the OASIS's source code? Why can some people hack their VR systems to control multiple people, but not just no-clip through the floor and grab Halliday's Easter-egg without worrying about his inane riddles? Nothing in or out of the game makes sense--even the tern 'Easter-egg' is misused. If, as Halliday does, you announce to the world that you hid something in your game, and then make it a public quest with global learderboards, then it's not a hidden secret. It's just a normal quest with a huge reward. Cline fails in the one basic thing he set out to do when he can't even get his nerd terminology right.
The more I type the more I want to say, but I have already given this book more attention than it deserves, so let me get back on track.
Cline, when not wasting paragraphs listing off the names of each anime, video game, song, and movie he has even heard of, used Wade's story to go on embarrassing tirades about god, or masturbation, or whatever else he wanted to blog about on that day. When he finally returns from these tangents to try and advance the plot, he describes his scenes in long-winded, pointless prose that adds nothing but more lists of references or redundant detail. Too often the references are made and then described, such as when the oragami unicorn from Blade Runner appears as one of Halliday's clues; and then the next paragraph or so is spent informing the audience what Blade Runner is--but only what it is. There is no engagement with the media here, we do not get insight into what Blade Runner means to Wade, only that he has seen it, and that it is 'very cool' or 'awesome' or whatever. The references are barely an aesthetic; no deeper meaning is generated by incorporating them.
At times the writing is downright insulting. Not once, but two separate times, the world 'unique' is used, and then Wade proceeds to tell us what 'unique' means. I do not have the exact quote on me, but it was to the effect of: "[Each username in the OASIS was unique, which meant that no two people could have the same name.]" YES ERNEST, THAT IS LITERALLY WHAT UNIQUE MEANS. GOOD JOB. Again, he does this twice, with almost exactly the same phrasing both times. I could not believe my ears.
I haven't even touched on all the problematic elements of the work. Wade is a creep toward a fellow female player named Art3mis, and is then rewarded for his stalker-ish behavior in the end when he gets the girl. It's not as blatant as the misogyny in Stranger in a Strange Land, but it's still pretty uncomfortable. (Incidentally, if you really want insight into what Ernest thinks of women, check out his infamous poem: 'Nerd Porn Auteur'). There's also some LiteRacism™ in the characters of Diato and Shoto, two Japanese teenagers whose character traits consist of Samurai gear and more talk of 'honor' than Prince Zuko could stomach. There's a lot to unpack in that, but I really don't care to do it. It's not even worth the effort.
There is one thing that almost works, one moment of genuine humanity drowned in this mechanical regurgitation of the last 20 years of western nerd media consumption. Wade's relationship with a virtual friend, known only as 'H,' almost works. Specifically the reveal that H is not, in fact, the dudebro he acts like, but a chubby black girl estranged from her mother because of her sexuality. Wade realizes in the moment he meets her that she is still the same person. Her personhood is shown to transcend her labels, and his brief feeling of betrayal is washed away into relief as he realizes that all the time he spent with H in VR had genuine meaning. It is a legitimately sweet moment, but their relationship is given little focus in comparison to the rest of the narrative. There are no other thematic tie-ins to the ideas touched upon in that scene, no overarching statement about the human condition or a reflection on the consequences of the interplay between the interconnectedness and anonymity brought on by technology. Instead we are quickly sent back to lists and the one-sided, immature romance between Wade and Art3mis. The moment is an aberration; a broken clock glanced at the right time of day.
Ready Player One is available on Amazon in a variety of formats. Its film adaption, directed by Steven Spielberg, will be in theaters March 29th. Please don't go see it.
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