Baby Got Books

Ready Player Two

Our fearless leader Tim’s review of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One inspired me to add that one to the stack, and what a great add it was. If Tim was Player One, I guess I’m Player Two.

If you’ve read anything at all about Cline’s book, you probably know that it takes place in the year 2044, in times where our society is a disaster. We don’t get enough information from Cline to necessarily call it dystopian (a la Brave New World), but suffice it to say that despite advances in technology, times are tough and some significant sector of society is slumming it.

Our protagonist, Wade Watts, is one of those people who is slumming it. He is an overweight social outcast who lives with some extended family and countless guests in the “stacks” — vertically stacked trailer homes — outside Oklahoma City. But Wade’s escape from the horrors of day-to-day life, like many others, is to log in to the OASIS, a virtual world that allows users to create a virtual identity and live in a virtual world with virtual friends, virtual toys, and virtual joy and excitement. Even though Watts is poor, he at least has a computer and the necessary equipment to log in to the OASIS (where he also attends high school virtually), which he does in his secret hideout inside a van at a nearby junkyard.

So far, so good, right? Standard futuristic blah, blah, blah, right? Well, this is where Cline takes his novel into a direction that, while not completely original or unexpected, is flawlessly executed. The man who founded the company that created the OASIS, James Halliday, has passed away and in his will has disclosed that he’s hidden an “easter egg” somewhere in the Oasis, and that the user who can find the three virtual keys to pass through three virtual gates to access this easter egg will inherit his fortune (including the OASIS). This sends the entire world into a tizzy as companies, teams of individuals, and independent “gunters” like Wade Watts, a/k/a “Parzival”, put aside their lives to embark on a quest for the easter egg.

To this reader there were two elements of Cline’s story that struck a chord. The first, which might only resonate with me and others from my generation, was that Halliday was a child of the 1980′s, and so his clues and the tasks that users must accomplish to advance in their quest are all tied to the 1980′s. Movies, tv, music, video games, etc. So it was unavoidable for me to try to test my own skills as we went along. I didn’t fare as well as I would have thought.

The second really cool thing about Cline’s book, and this would be equally valid for any reader regardless of how much you know or care about the 1980′s, was how Cline blurred the line between the real and virtual worlds. As players’ avatars interact with other avatars, and as greed and hostility manifest themselves in the OASIS, it becomes clear that certain participants aren’t playing fair and are using their money and power in the real world to gain an advantage. This includes monitoring real people’s behaviors, and eventually murder. Alliances that are formed in the virtual world extend into the real world, and mystery and adventure ensue.

No spoilers here, other than to say that once the story got going, it was literally (meaning I mean it) a virtual (meaning I read it on my Nook) literary virtual-reality page turner.