Staff Pick - Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

[Brian Bess]

Virtual video gaming in a Geek's Dystopian Future


I began reading this book with much trepidation, skepticism and prejudice. I knew the book depended primarily on its content for video gamers’ fanaticism and a love for not only the geekiest pop culture knowledge but also nostalgia for 1980's culture. None of these I possess. I readily admit that the 1980's is the least favorite decade of my lifetime (at this point extending all the way back to the last half of the 1950's). Reliving an era that was traumatic for me personally as well as a time when I felt that art and culture became infiltrated with ugliness and rampant attraction to the lowest common denominator is distasteful. However, admitting those prejudices I will say that I needed to give this novel the benefit of the doubt. I only read it because it is the selection of the library system for which I work for their 2015 Community Read. After all, I have a professional responsibility, do I not?

I will also admit that the premise of this novel is fascinating. Cline visualizes a future in which corporations have taken over most governmental regulation, poverty has run rampant and many people, such as the first person narrator/hero Wade Watts, an eighteen-year old high school student lives in his real life in a high rise trailer park i.e. double wide’s are stacked on top of each other on levels supported by giant scaffolding referred to, obviously, as 'stacks'. Wade goes to school in a virtual classroom. Therefore, he has spent much of his 'real' life rarely associating face to face with any other human. Meanwhile, he has educated himself on computers, video games and pop culture from the 20th century, at least fifty years before he was born, primarily the geek's Golden Era, the 1980's. This was also the decade that provided departed billionaire James Halliday with his formative years. Halliday is a kind of composite of Bill Gates and Howard Hughes, who was a pseudo autistic tech genius that also happened to found, along with his best friend, still living Ogden Morrow, a billion dollar virtual empire. Among his creations was a virtual network that superseded the Internet, OASIS. Life in the OASIS has become more attractive and addicting as real life has become bleaker and less prosperous. Halliday always believed in equal opportunity to OASIS and so vowed to only charge one lifetime fee of 25 cents per person.

Each futuristic ‘oasis’, real or virtual, needs an opposing force and there is a potent villain in the form of the powerful corporation Innovative Online Industries (IOI), which hopes to gain control of OASIS and transform it into a profit greedy money pit, preying on the addiction of the needy public.


Wade, although only an eighteen-year old high school senior, has somehow found the time in his short life to devour hundreds of movies, TV shows, books, videogames and cultural references from the 1980’s and beyond and developed his gaming expertise to master level. He has decided he will win the game, find the ‘egg’ and win Halliday’s fortune. He does miraculously manage to be the first one to survive the first level and find the first key. In doing this, he has become an instant celebrity while hundreds of other gamers as well as IOI are trying to do the same thing. He becomes infatuated with Art3mis, a young female roughly his age, at least according to her avatar which may or may not be a true reflection of who she is or even whether she’s really male or female. His best friend, Aach, is another gamer whom he has also never met face to face.


Obstacles mount and are always surmounted by Wade and the evil corporation becomes increasingly more ruthless and desperate to exterminate all opponents. Wade has covered his tracks in the real world very thoroughly—too thoroughly for an eighteen-year old geek. Outwitting the evil corporation as well as the thousands of competitors is a feat that might even be beyond the limits of any number of fictional super sleuths and spies. Nevertheless, Wade conquers opponents and overwhelming odds. Along the way, he name drops dozens of movies, games, TV shows and commercials. Each cultural icon occurs to him at just the right moment to provide clues that no one else has thought of.


This novel is entirely too clever for its own good. To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut’s appraisal of self-referential literature written by literature professors, it disappears up its own anus. Several chapters pass without any reference to THIS three-dimensional world and so much action occurs in a virtual world that Cline seems to forget to root most of it in what is happening in this world. He needs to learn some basic fiction writing techniques, any of which he could learn from dystopian masters such as Ray Bradbury, Phillip K. Dick or any number of others writers of futuristic fiction. If he had spent as much time and effort reading these authors as his hero Wade spends devouring 1980’s culture he might be able to turn out an extended narrative that actually hangs together with its own structural and logical unity.