Review of Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is a science fiction novel about Wade Watts, certified obsessive 80’s connoisseur and fresh-air-deficient recluse. He lives and goes to school in an old abandoned van—at least until the evil corporation blows up part of his neighborhood in an attempt to take him out and he flees to the city—but I’ll get to that later.
The novel starts with a whole bunch of setup and worldbuilding-related exposition as Wade goes about his regular high-schooler business. We’re told about James Halliday, the egg hunt, the egg hunters, James Halliday’s business, James Halliday’s obsession with the 1980’s, and Wade’s living and schooling situation. All that, plus the Metaverse itself, its basic functions, perks, rules, etc., because the majority of the story takes place in it. Sorry, did I say Metaverse? I meant OASIS. The computer world.
Anyway, after eight or so chapters of setting everything up, we finally get to the plot—solving the big fancy Internet scavenger hunt. You’d think it gets more interesting at this point. Well, you’re right. It gets mildly more interesting. Bear in mind that I’m just a wee young’un who was born way, way after the eighties, so about ninety percent of the references went over my head, leaving me very apathetic, since I didn’t know or care about anything the author was referencing. I knew three of the bands mentioned, two songs, and one movie. Zero games, and I didn’t even know the movie that well. I feel like for the entire hunt, the author was relying on nostalgia to keep people interested. Nostalgia that I didn’t have, so I wasn’t interested. From an outsider’s perspective, the challenges were all the same. Solve a riddle (one with zero intrigue, since I had no chance of trying to guess it on my own, since I had no basis of knowledge for any of them), play some arcade game on super hard mode, and reenact a movie. I could see why people who know and like that stuff would be into it (I’ll admit, the few references I caught left me charmed) but I was so bored for the majority of it. Not only was it all about media I had no knowledge of, but Wade was hardly challenged for any of it. He struggled a bit for the riddles, but once he got over that hump he breezed through the rest.
Besides the hunt, the other main focus is the other hunters. There’s Wade, whose main personality trait is that he needs to touch some grass, Aech, who’s Wade but a bit more boisterous, Art3mis, who is a girl, two other guys who exist to be dramatically killed off, (one virtually, one legit murdered), and the evil corporation people, who are evil and work for a corporation. You can tell they’re evil because they cheat, bribe, try to murder Wade, and actually murder one of the other hunters. You can tell they work for a corporation because they have unlimited finances, technology, weapons, and troops. The Sixers, as they’re called, want to win the game to gain complete control of the OASIS and charge people money to use it. Because they’re eeeevil!
Is it bad that I was kind of rooting for them, though? I mean, I absolutely don’t agree with their methods, since they murdered one of the competitors and tried to blow up Wade, but if they made the OASIS pay-to-use, being forced off the internet might benefit a lot of these characters. They might develop personalities, for one. They’d break their Internet addictions. Perhaps, instead of zoning out and hiding from the dystopian real world, they’d be forced to interact with reality and might even do something to positively affect it. These people could be doing a billion different productive things instead of overdosing on virtual entertainment. The Sixers taking over OASIS would probably inadvertently help a lot of people. Too bad they’re murderers. Keeps me from rooting for them entirely. They only kill minor, unimportant characters, though. Nobody whose death has a real impact on the story. They need to be evil, they just can’t be so evil that they ruin Wade’s power trip. Can’t make him reflect on the potential consequences of getting obsessed with the hunt, or maybe rethink things, he has games to play.
My notes about the other characters aren’t as thorough, because the characters themselves
are shallow and there’s not much to take notes about. Art3mis, being the only prominent girl character, is also the designated love interest for Wade. They get together at the end even though they have no chemistry at all. It was painful. I didn’t mind Shoto and his brother. There wasn’t much to mind, since there wasn’t much to them at all. Aech’s reveal at the end was forced and had no impact on the story.
Speaking of the end, what kind of ending was that? Trying to pull a thought-provoking moral on me after hundreds of pages of mindless media consumerism? Cline spends the entire book focusing on and glorifying Internetland, saying it’s so much better than the dreary awful real world, then at the end he pulls a complete 180*, out of absolutely nowhere, and Wade suddenly goes “hey, reality sure is great, isn’t it?”
Nuh-uh. No way, not buying it. Where did that opinion even come from? None of the characters enjoyed anything about reality once! For the entire book! If Wade loved reality so much, why didn’t he let the Sixers win so more people could be exposed to it? The OASIS is a drug and by winning the contest and keeping it free, Wade is enabling everyone addicted to it. The world is not going to get better if people hide from it all the time.
In conclusion, I thought Ready Player One was shallow and meaningless, and tries to shove a moral in at the last second just for the sake of having one. It gets all its charm from the franchises it references, so it lacks anything of its own to stand on. Maybe at the time of its release, the concept of OASIS was unique, but now that so much of our lives are embedded in the virtual world, and Facebook just recently made it a real thing, it’s not anything special. My final nitpick is that, for a book with so many 1980’s callbacks, there was not a single one for Weird Al Yankovic. I find that slightly disappointing, because I’m petty and Weird Al is cool and also very 1980’s-y. He’s the one who introduced me to the music of the decade, so he’s the only reason I got the references I did.
Even though I found Ready Player One shallow and dull, it was at least competent. I’ve read worse, so its final score is 2/5.