Ready Player One

Ready Player One, a sci-fi novel written by Ernest Cline, uses the vastness of the geek universe to compose the base of its narrative without capturing a fraction of its wonder. The book is plagued by one-dimensional characters and fails to deliver anything more than glorified references.

The story takes place in a decrepit society dominated by mega-corporations, where hunger, war, disease, and the terrible consequences of climate change have become common afflictions in the lives of the common people (that is, basically nowadays, but a bit worse). In this scenario, the people’s only means of escapism is digital: the so-called “Oasis” is a gigantic MMO in VR, a free virtual reality software of unimaginable proportions that allows anyone to embody a custom-made avatar, live epic adventures, and do whatever they want in a digital space, sharing the same unending universe with all other players.

The protagonist, Wade Watts, is a poor, orphan boy who lives in the house of an aunt who can’t stand him. The only good part of his day is when he goes to the Oasis, where he takes part in a worldwide hunt for special keys. Because here’s the thing: when the creator of the Oasis, James Halliday, died, he left his entire fortune – including the rights to his company – to the first person who solves his special in-game puzzles and acquires three unique keys in the Oasis. But, to be able to accomplish this feat, one must share his obsession with the geek culture of the 1980s.

To affirm that the novel is full of references to videogames, comic books, anime, movies, music, D&D, and what else worked as entertainment in the eighties is a euphemism: these references make up not only the foundation of the narrative but also the pillars, the roof, the furniture, the decoration, the dust under the bed, and especially, the trash can that was left open and untouched for far too long and made the entire place stink.

Characters complain about Ladyhawke, play several Atari titles, become Ultraman, drive a Delorean, pay homage to Vonnegut, and order the same favorite drink as the protagonist of Highlander when visiting a bar. These references are part of their language, and they often dispute who knows the smallest detail of the instruction manual of some old video game (I miss game manuals).

However, since the novel is narrated in the first person by Wade, this obsession is reflected in the text itself, which is rife with descriptions saturated with references to geek culture – sometimes there are five in a single short paragraph. It feels like Wade is showing off, but the problem is that this quickly becomes tiresome and makes the character unbearable to follow, since passages like this are far too common: “When I reached the bar, I ordered a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster from the female Klingon bartender and downed half of it. Then I grinned as R2 cued up another classic ’80s tune. ‘Union of the Snake,’ I recited, mostly out of habit. ‘Duran Duran. Nineteen eighty-three.’”

If the narrative can’t sustain this approach for too long it’s because it makes the fatal mistake of conveying the protagonist’s obsession but not his passion. In other words, it makes the importance of the geek universe to Wade clear to us, as he practically breathes the eighties, but fails to show why that time generates such fascination in the boy. It’s a problem of quality, not quantity.

The discussions about comic books, games, and movies, for example, although omnipresent, are entirely… superficial. A good example is a debate Wade has with his friend Aech about Ladyhawke: the protagonist simply states that the film is “good” and “an eighties classic”, cites the name of the actors, and points out the director’s other works. Aech, meanwhile, accuses the movie of being “lame” and a “chick flick” (heavy sigh). One shouldn’t expect complex discussions about cinematography, sound design, and camera angles from these characters, but something less superficial, like discussing narrative arcs, themes, or at least the plot, was important. After all, the more you like a subject, the more you want to know about it, and this discussion between Wade and Aech – which still is one of the biggest and most complex in the book, the bar is that low – doesn’t surpass the level of a regular person with access to IMDB. They may have information about movies, but definitely don’t show any love for the art.

In the same vein, the scenes about Wade’s ability to solve Halliday’s puzzles end up ringing equally hollow. In one of them, for example, the boy needs to break the world record in Pac-Man. He, then, goes on to tell how he has read several strategy books and studied several famous players to win, but never really gets into the strategies themselves. Ready Player One never commits to the bit, it never does the work to be able to really delve into Wade’s world and go beyond surface level.

As a character, Wade functions as a symbol of the problems that affect the whole novel, being an empty, disgusting shell when deprived of his geek mask. The protagonist is a teenager full of hormones with an encyclopedic knowledge about the eighties who’s also considerably sexist, to the point that, after being rejected by a girl, he feels the need to replace her with a robotic sex doll (jesus christ). This should reveal how correct she was to reject him in the first place, but the narrative, of course, is oblivious to that.

The boy seems to be a good person only when in opposition to the antagonist, a greedy company that plans to win Halliday’s contest just so it can start charging a monthly fee for access to the Oasis – which until then only generated profit via microtransactions. Wade argues that this change would deprive the masses of their primary means of escapism in a harsh world. He also condemns the company’s proposal to end anonymity in the game, defending that it helps insecure people to express themselves (lies, deception).

Ready Player One, true to form, never discusses these issues in depth and is content to just position Wade as right and the greedy company as wrong, wasting the potential of the subject matter: the problem of anonymity, which provides sanctuary for bigots, allowing them to spread hate speech without fear of being held responsible for their words, for example, is not even mentioned. Wade is good and heroic, and the company is bad and villainous. It’s as simple as that here.

The geek world is also romanticized without reservation: while groups of geeks appear welcoming to their equals (as if) and being a geek seems to automatically make a person a hacker (what), the incredible “hardships” the group must endure are also exalted: “You see, thinkers, inventors, and scientists are usually geeks, and geeks have a harder time getting laid than anyone. Without the built-in sexual release valve provided by masturbation, it’s doubtful that early humans would have ever mastered the secrets of fire or discovered the wheel” (this gif).

The narrative cannot even properly develop the political panorama of its universe. The Oasis, for example, offers free access to an education system of the highest quality, and there is even a social program that delivers the hardware for free to the people. Such a thing would be huge enough to shake up the status quo and diminish social inequality, but such consequences never seem to have come to Wade’s world, and the reason for this is not mentioned either.

The hunt for the keys is also formulaic and unimaginative, with puzzles that vary between being too obvious – the first – and too obtuse – the second – while the action sequences can only excite those who recognize the book’s many references (and I’m being kind here). There are several reasons for this: the characters are flat, the action takes place mostly in the digital universe where nobody is in real danger, and Wade, of course, is more concerned with pointing out that he knows the names of all the elements involved in the battle than with trying to narrate it in an exciting way, always slowing down the pace of an action scene with his explanations.

Finally, there is the problem of the inconsistency with the narrator’s voice in the prologue, which, despite being Wade’s, is different from the one used in the rest of the chapters: only in the prologue does he use footnotes to point out the numerous references in the text, relegating them to a secondary, unimportant position, which they definitely do not assume in the rest of the narrative. It would have been possible to argue that the change would symbolize the end of the character’s arc, reflecting the end of his obsessive behavior, if the rest of the book was not narrated in the past tense. That is, the Wade who writes the prologue is the same as the rest of the book.

Too busy getting lost amidst its endless references, Ready Player One ends up being devoured by its own narrative, failing to properly develop its premise, characters, themes, and universe (Player One was not ready at all, it turns out, we simply can’t trust titles nowadays).

Review originally published in Portuguese on March 1, 2018.

January 06, 2024.