Oh, they have a Grue…
My friend gave me a copy of Ready Player One to read on the plane back to Japan, but my airline tricked me into flying a 777 without reclining seats or accessible reading lights or wi-fi, so I didn’t get to finish it till today nor did I realize how enormously popular it is until I randomly googled it. It’s a really good book, but has some really irritating flaws, so here is my review.
The basic idea of the story is simple and powerful, and I’m surprised it took so long to be written. It’s set in a dystopian near future (where, for once, the effect of climate change is stated and assumed throughout the story), where the world economy is slowly falling apart but there is a new virtual reality internet called the OASIS, where people can spend basically their whole lives escaping the boredom and horrors of everyday life. This world is fully interactive using haptic gloves and suits, so a kind of addictive experience (fortunately the author doesn’t use this silly idea of internet addiction), but it is also huge, a kind of galaxy of many worlds where almost anything can happen. The designer of the OASIS has died, but instead of leaving a will he has left behind his fortune, plus the title to control the company that designed the OASIS, as a prize in a complex game that, when the book starts, no one has won. This idea is patently ludicrous: the OASIS is the most important technological development in human history (as an example, our lead character receives his education through the OASIS and it is clearly a superior education to any physical school) but its developer has left the deed to the thing for any random gamer dickhead to take possession of. We’ve all seen what gamers are like – would you want the world’s biggest and most important company to be controlled by them?
And it is clear from the book that it is gamers who will take the prize, since the prize is a complex series of challenges based entirely on computer games. In order to crack the puzzles one needs to be an exceptional gamer; but worse still, all the clues to the puzzles are drawn from 1980s nerd and teen pop culture, so in order to find the clues one needs to be deeply invested in such execrable crap as The Breakfast Club and Highlander. One also needs to be a genius with 1980s arcade games, possibly the worst games ever invented.
As a result of this plot device, the book is a constant pastiche of 80s references, and the characters are the kind of losers you hated in first year university, who quote Monty Python in place of social interaction, and think going to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show is the height of cool. Worse still, the characters in this story are the worst kind of computer game winners: they may not be able to get laid or interact with actual human beings, but in the OASIS they’re unbelievably, perfectly good at everything. Worst of all is our hero Wade, who when challenged is able without any appreciable effort to get a perfect score in pacman, and wins a contest (based on a computer game) that the next best competitor took five weeks of constant striving to win. He’s also capable of hacking international corporations, quickly hacking the system to create a new identity for himself, and making leaps of intuitive faith about obscure 1980s game and video references even though he was never part of the 1980s culture and only understands these things from studying his hero. He is, of course, also stunningly good at PvP first person combat games.
In short, he (and his three colleagues) are at a Harry Potter level of unrealistic character development. Mixed with all the worst traits of the nerd world, and an urgent need to prove how smart they are. Reading about these kinds of people is annoying!
However, the challenge is also intoxicating, and the growth of the relationships between the main characters – and the challenges they face in solving the puzzle – is really compelling. Although I didn’t like any of the characters, I soon found myself really wanting them to survive and really engaged with the story. It’s a tense, tight, well-told tale with several unexpected twists and turns, and much of the setting is a range of magical or technological fantasy worlds that make it a fairly unique mix of real world and fantastic tales. The magical world much of it is set in (the OASIS) seems very unrealistic, but it’s also a stimulating and interesting vision of how the future could unfold if the technology were available. If you can put aside the constant, mostly lame, references to the 80s, and the really boring and annoying way in which the characters are almost perfect in every way relevant to their quest, it’s an exciting and enjoyable romp through a very well realized image of the future of society’s relationship with the internet. I strongly recomend this book for gamers and those interested in visions of the future in which communication and internet technology trumps manufacturing and off-world exploration – it’s a fascinating and exciting story with an excellent ending! If you have any interest in virtual worlds, and enjoy watching ordinary people get it wrong and then somehow struggling through to get it right, then I strongly recommend this book!
Compromise and Conceit 
March 12, 2015 at 10:32 am
Have you read (or tried to read) Tad Williams “Otherland” series? It seems to be polarising in terms or reviews, and it is rather long, but its conception of a virtual reality is similar to that described above, mercifully without the 80s nonsense you describe. It’s been a while since I read it so I’m not sure if the pacing would hold my attention now, but if you haven’t read it give it a try…
March 12, 2015 at 11:17 am
“when challenged is able without any appreciable effort to get a perfect score in pacman, and wins a contest (based on a computer game) that the next best competitor took five weeks of constant striving to win. ”
In its defence, the book actually does bother describing the fact he’s practiced Pac-man a lot, but never achieved a perfect score before. And talks at length about how he trained for the game that the other competitor had never experienced.
The biggest logic hole in the book is the first puzzle is pretty easy to solve and then a simple automated map check will reveal the location if you choose the right planet. But no one (in 10+ years) has bothered brute forcing the solution by just checking every planet…
The other baffling thing is that OASIS has perma-character death in some locations and that those locations aren’t quiet as the grave. Your OASIS character has OASIS money on it, which is convertible into both real and virtual goods. If your character dies with a billion virtual dollars in their account not only do you lose your gear [1] it’d seem that you get to roll up a new level 1 character with $0. Who would risk losing all their access to actual physical goods to visit an area of a computer game? What company would think this was a good set-up?
But I agree, the central idea that a virtual world could more easily meet everyone’s needs and wants is an interesting one. If the central premise of OASIS, that people can become more attached to virtual than real life, was true then providing a Star Trek/Culture level of post-scarcity life becomes trivial. +6 Holy Avengers for everyone!
[1] Note that most online games now regard that as being a step too far [2], even when they have free-for-all PVP.
[2] Everquest corpse runs sucked [3]. But OASIS regards them as too easy, because you have a non-zero chance of getting your stuff back.
[3] Just thinking about this is making me flash back to running naked through dungeons with a train of monsters following me while hammering my /corpse macro. God those were appalling times…
March 12, 2015 at 1:56 pm
I just hope Paul’s last footnote was game not meta.
Thanks for the review. It linked in my mind to Lev Grossman’s Magician series (via obscure arcade games, which play a passing role in those). Well worth a read.
March 12, 2015 at 8:51 pm
Thanks for the recommendations, Peter T and LJS.
Paul, I grant you the book is consistent, I just find the supreme abilities of the main characters annoying. Also the supreme brilliance of Halliday and the godlike status people ascribe to him is really annoying. The book says that 7 or so people in history have got a perfect pacman score, which makes our protagonist in the top 8 computer gamers of all time. Plus he is also brilliant at a whole range of other games, and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the 80s that far surpasses anyone who actually ever lived there. These kinds of characters always annoy me.
I think there is another plot hole at the end, where the characters forget the last gate is being filmed (even though Parzival had watched extensive film of it) and then are surprised when they realize they were being filmed. You’re right about the first puzzle – the sixers are able to figure out much harder puzzles very quickly but they don’t do a brute force hack on the first one despite their resources. [Speaking of which, the existence of the sixers and the way a corporation tries to game the competition is a really good idea – it makes a lot of sense and the idea that a clueless computer gamer would set up a competition with a prize of this value and not realize his competitors would try to hijack it in this way is pretty funny. Of course in reality if an organization threw that many resources at such a problem they would solve it long before anyone else did. Maybe there’s a windows vs. open source metaphor buried in there?]
Good point about character death and PvP settings as well. I also thought the character death thing was a bit incongruous. If you want to build a functioning [i.e. profitable] alternative to the real world in your matrix, the existence of perma-death is going to be chucked out at stage 1 – people aren’t going to sign up for a world where they have the same constraints as actual mortality, and the idea that you could be cruising through a PvP area enjoying the view and then lose years’ worth of careful investment because some arsehole 12 year old whacked you is just insane. I remember once when I briefly delved into WoW, passing through an oasis and this tauren dude who was just sitting there fishing whacked me with some kind of huge 70th level blessing just for the sake of being nice. Didn’t even put down his fishing rod. If on some other day some dude could just fireball me to ash on the same level of whim, and I would lose years of accumulated gear and money when he did it … I would never go to a PvP area! Unless I planned on hanging around high level battlefields and rushing in to pick up dropped loot …
I wonder if Yanis Varoufakis has read this book? He’d probably have a thing or two to say about the OASIS economy …
March 13, 2015 at 12:26 pm
”Plus he is also brilliant at a whole range of other games, and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the 80s that far surpasses anyone who actually ever lived there. These kinds of characters always annoy me.”
Really? I just thought “What a f***ed up culture that there are people running having spent all their lives obsessing about 80s pop culture!” And worse than corrupting a large segment of the world to focus on a past pop culture, Halliday has actually set it up that the corruption is going to be ongoing. The new set of richest people on the planet are 80s obsessed dorks…
The horror of the novel is that we’re frequently also told about modern (in the time of the book) art & culture – which is all re-workings of 80s culture! You don’t hear the main character even complain about music that isn’t from the 80s because, as far as we can tell, there is none. History has stopped.
”Speaking of which, the existence of the sixers and the way a corporation tries to game the competition is a really good idea … Maybe there’s a windows vs. open source metaphor buried in there?”
Yeah, I liked the idea of the sixers. But if there’s one thing that modern software teaches us it’s that a large group of nerds motivated by nothing in particular is going to move roughly as quickly and efficiently than a large organisation motivated by money.
Or do the genius decisions taken by Microsoft impress you so much? 🙂
“Good point about character death and PvP settings as well.”
My initial thinking on it was driven by PvP, but it actuall applies for PvE (Player versus Environment) settings too. If you accidently mis-click on one of the guards at the edge of the city they beat you to death! If makes Ferguson look like a low risk environment! Or at least only medium risk…
@Peter T:
”I just hope Paul’s last footnote was game not meta.”
The most terrifying idea about dropping LSD would be that I’d get a trip that lame 🙂
March 13, 2015 at 1:45 pm
That’s a good point about the omnipresence of 80s culture in the modern world. How horrid. Maybe this is why some aspects of the story annoyed me so much … the future of humanity is a white sneaker stomping on a heavily made-up human face, forever.
March 16, 2015 at 1:57 am
A good review. I remember reading this a couple of years ago. I think you’re over-busting balls here on char dev. Yeah, he’s got some slightly unbelievable strokes of very convenient good luck, but what YA book doesn’t suffer from that?
“its developer has left the deed to the thing for any random gamer dickhead to take possession of.”
This to me doesn’t seem that outlandish. The developer seems like a hacker (more so than a gamer) to me, and hackers have that inherent playful trait about them. That and the whole “freedom of information” mentality.
Also, mind-f*ck puzzles abound the internet (not pr0n, cicada…). Those are more or less lulzy but a lot of companies have taken up this approach to hire good talent.
March 16, 2015 at 10:55 am
Good points sillynomad. I didn’t really think of the book as YA until I was a good distance into it, when I had a brief spurt of anger at having been tricked into reading YA lit. But the best YA lit usually has protagonists who are vulnerable and weak (not just emotionally vulnerable, either) – anyway, even if I’m wrong about that I find these kinds of invincible characters annoying (this is also why I gave up reading Dune, for example – once that dude became a God it got boring). Maybe that’s why I don’t read much YA …
I guess you’re right about Halliday being a Hacker rather than a business person, so maybe the whole book is actually a warning about what will happen to the world once the 80s nerds get serious power in business and politics … *shudder*