Ready Player One (Ready Player One, #1) in RAoA Reading Challenge

Sep 18, 2012 Kami rated it it was amazing

Shelves: sci-fi, young-adult, adventure, dystopia, rrrc

This is by far the geekiest book I have ever read and I loved it so very much. It made me nostalgic for the '80's. Gamer Geek to infinity. This book is definitely in my top three of best loved books that I have read this year. So good. ...more

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Dec 29, 2014 Kristin-Leigh rated it liked it

Shelves: 2015-reads

For me this was basically a fun popcorn flick in novel form - light, entertaining, super fast-paced, but also not very deep and with a lot of moments that made me roll my eyes after I thought about them a bit. The plot was familiar, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing - it was comfortable, in the sense that the whole time I was reading I "knew" what was going to happen and all that was really in question was how exactly the author intended to get me there in the end. I've already recommended it For me this was basically a fun popcorn flick in novel form - light, entertaining, super fast-paced, but also not very deep and with a lot of moments that made me roll my eyes after I thought about them a bit. The plot was familiar, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing - it was comfortable, in the sense that the whole time I was reading I "knew" what was going to happen and all that was really in question was how exactly the author intended to get me there in the end. I've already recommended it to a couple people, and I'll be interested to see if (when) the movie adaptation is made - I think this story will be really well suited to that format!

I'm a sucker for the "game show/competition on a large scale" trope in novels (especially if the stakes are life and death, which in this case they are not - directly) and on that front it did not disappoint.

That said, don't pick this one up looking for anything deep or particularly meaningful. The characters are all pretty one-dimensional: there's the poorly-researched Japanese stereotype who misuses fanboy Japanese words like "seppuku," the low-income computer genius hacker savant with a little bit of baby fat he loses via time lapse exposition 60% through the novel, and of course, the sassy love interest who is not at ALL like those other female avatars around and is accessible and secretly insecure about a physical non-flaw (I was betting on something like a prosthesis or wheelchair use; it wound up being a birthmark).

The challenges the characters face don't hold up to fridge logic particularly well - for example, are we really supposed to believe that in five years nobody really thought to literally interpret the clue "you have much to learn" as a call to go scope out the level where all the school buildings are located? There aren't many surprises thrown into the formula used: character comes up from adversity, character makes a surprising discovery, character experiences setbacks and is joined by friends, someone dies tragically, characters vow vengeance, characters part ways and eventually must come together in the end, etc etc etc - with 80s trivia!

And this is petty, but I have to nitpick since gaming is my industry: I hope Ernest Cline has rethought his views on the holiness of freemium gaming - it's amusing that aside from the generic Evil Corporation Stuff perpetrated by the villains, their main flaw is that they want to make OASIS into a subscription gaming site (like World of warcraft and other similar currently-existing sites). This is presented as being somehow less democratic than the service's current incarnation as a "free" service where anyone can create an avatar, but the game is unusable and boring unless you pay to leave the starter levels and buy equipment. ...more

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