Review: READY PLAYER ONE

Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One is a love-letter to nostalgia. As the name implies, it focuses on gaming, but all types of popular culture--from movies to music--are lovingly referenced. I didn't read it when it came out in 2011, nor have I seen Spielberg's 2018 adaptation, but I've always been aware of the story. I've recently decided to borrow a copy of the audiobook (narrated by Wil Wheaton) from my local library. I was sceptical; having heard so much about the nostalgia, and so little about the characters, story, and prose, I began to suspect that the nostalgia was all the book had to offer. Still, this book did resonate with a lot of people, so there must be something worthwhile about it. Even if it might not be the sort of book I'd love, it might at least be the sort I'd like--something with a few fun scenes that'll help pass the time.

And that's exactly what it was.

Cline's novel takes place in 2045, in a society that revolves around an MMO known as the OASIS, which has become so large it's essentially replaced the internet. The creator of this world, a video game designer named James Halliday, has passed away some time before our story properly starts. He was a huge nerd and, in a tribute to the classic adventure game, Adventure, he left an Easter egg somewhere in the OASIS. This egg was announced shortly after his death, along with a promise that the first to find it would inherit his Gates-sized fortune and ownership of the OASIS. Because Halliday was a pop culture-obsessed child of the 80s, those who have dedicated themselves to finding his egg (known as "Egg Hunters," or, more informally and more frequently, "Gunters") spend much of their time studying his obsessions. This led to a world where the children of Gen Z have decided that playing Tempest for hours on end counts as research and memorizing War Games is just as respectable as memorizing King Lear.

The protagonist and narrator is high school student Parzival, or "Wade Watts" in the real world. He's a traditional hero: an underdog with a gift that he uses to raise himself from poverty. It just so happens that his gift is being an expert on Halliday--and, by extension, on nerd culture. He can understand Latin, play a guitar, program on a professional level, and earn enough credits to graduate before finishing his senior year of high school, but he seems to spend most of his time obsessing over pop culture history and trivia. Parzival talks, at length, about everything he has watched, read, listened to, and played. If he mentions a movie, he'll tell us how many times he's seen it, using numbers that are both impressively large and unusually precise.

The supporting cast includes Art3mis, a cool, intelligent, famous blogger who becomes Parzival's love interest; Aech, a higher-level adventurer who Parzival has never met in person but still considers his best friend; Sorrento, the villain who works at the telecommunications company, Innovative Online Industries (or IOI); and Daito and Shoto, a team of Japanese, samurai-obsessed otaku Gunters. The characters serve their role and serve them well, but they never really stand out as particularly memorable. Aech and Art3mis are both hiding something about themselves from Parzival, and their motives make sense, but neither of their revelations are interesting or impactful enough to really qualify as plot twists. Considering this is a story about characters who hide their true selves behind their online personas, there's very little that seems to be worth concealing.

Pretty much all of the major characters have the same goal: find Halliday's Easter egg. There are some groups who have formed guilds to work together, but our protagonists are too competitive for that until near the end of the novel. Parzival is friends with Aech and has feelings for Art3mis, but is also competing against them, and whenever one does start to outpace the others, they help as little as they can justify to their conscience. By comparison, Sorrento is part of a large team. I find it interesting that teamwork--a trait typically reserved for heroes--is a villainous tool for most of Ready Player One.

The Easter egg hunt consists of a combination of puzzles and video gaming sessions. Solving the puzzles requires a vast knowledge of pop culture history and the ability to interpret hidden meaning from cryptic lines of verse. I'm a sucker for these sort of stories, and I'll admit to getting a rush every time a new clue was deciphered. I know that this book is mostly remembered for its nostalgia, but the puzzle solving was the highlight for me.

The novel's core crisis--that IOI will ruin the OASIS if they gain control of it--only works if the reader believes, as Parzival believes, that the OASIS is important--even worth dying for. In my opinion, Ernest Cline does make us believe that. That the OASIS is an addiction, and also so deeply imbedded into societies' nervous system that withdrawal could prove fatal, are not mutually exclusive. IOI will most likely make the OASIS more expensive--and, in doing so, lock the poor out of what has become a core part of their society. I also don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that, at the end of the story, Parzival is better-off than he was at the beginning specifically because of the OASIS, its Easter egg hunt, and his vast knowledge of video games and cinema. Having a world with the OASIS in it would be sort of depressing, and yet Parvizal's life was unquestionably improved by it. It's like the real-world internet: way too may people are addicted to it, but it's almost impossible to get by without a connection.

Ironically, the novel's biggest claim to fame--it's nostalgia--actually holds it back. The OASIS is a video game that is full of other, fully playable video games. At several points in the book, Parzival has to play games at a very high level, sometimes for hours. Most of these playing sessions can be divided into one of two categories: he's playing an adventure game, in which case he will simply inform us that he already knew everything about the game and got by all the puzzles without any trouble; or he's playing an arcade game, in which case he will mostly tell us how well he is doing rather than describe what he's doing. These parts are like trying to watch someone else play a video game when you can't see the screen, and there are far too many of them.

And yet, for all my problems with this book, it's oddly compelling. I don't know why. Maybe it's my love of crossovers and intertextuality. Maybe it's Wil Wheton's narration. Maybe it's just because the idea of a video game that would actually let you visit any setting from any work of fiction is extremely appealing. But Ready Player One had been a (for lack of a better term) guilty pleasure of mine. I might not have found the characters particularly interesting, but I did care about what happened to them. And, even though Ready Player Two is, by all accounts, worse than the first, I'm still planning to check the audiobook out.

Ready Player One is a very niche book. If you're not into gaming, then I can't imagine it would have anything to offer. If you are, it still might not. I probably wouldn't want to curl up in bed and read before going to sleep. But when I downloaded this book, I was looking for something easy to follow while at the gym or on a walk, and Ready Player One was perfect for that purpose. There are better books out there, sure, but there are certainly less entertaining ones as well.