Ready Player One: Chapter 1

0001: Michael J. Fox Was Alex P. Keaton

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We once again have a promising start for the chapter as Wade is awoken by the sound of gunshots outside. You get a real sense that Wade’s used to this too, as he turns to playing retro coin-op games to calm his nerves. Again, there’s a real sense of dystopia to the setting as Wade runs an old, beat-up laptop he salvaged out of the garbage. After a few games of Robotron: 2084, Wade cracks open the video files to watch Family Ties as a lead-in to talk about his own family life.

Given this is a YA dystopian book, it’s not a happy one. His father died when Wade was too young to even remember him, shot while looting a grocery store during a blackout. His mother pulled double duty as a telemarketer and escort in the OASIS to make ends meet. The OASIS was his only escape from that reality, giving him a virtual playground to actually be a kid and even getting access to stuff that would be well out of his reach, like books, movies, music and games.

Honestly, this isn’t really that bad a building block for a character. There’s a bit more meat on the bones of this story by having a character who pretty much grew up in the lower classes with a mother who couldn’t spend time with him due to having to support them both financially, but having the entirety of the virtual world of the OASIS to give him comfort. However, we take a nice little detour from that into baby first’s nihilism thesis.

Wade goes on a full-blown rant about how much the world sucks. Like, several paragraphs about how God isn’t real, Santa isn’t real, the Easter Bunny isn’t real, the Tooth Fairy isn’t real, there’s an energy crisis, climate change is happening, you are going to die and when you die, your body will rot in the earth and you will cease to exist.

Okay, so… that was… a lot. A whole lot of not anything important to the story and quite frankly, it was also a lot of arrogant posturing on the state of the world that feels more at place on something like r/atheism than in a book I spent $9.99 on for a Kindle edition. Like, really, Ernest? Did we need to halt the relation of Wade’s backstory for you to frontload us with all this jaded, cynical falderal? It’s a complete stop that takes up space that could be used for anything else of value.

A pretty appropriate description for the prose in this book, honestly; A complete stop in the narrative that takes up space that could be used for anything else of value.

We thankfully dial back a bit and continue on Wade’s backstory, learning that his mom had died of an overdose, eventually being taken in by her sister, Alice. Now, before we go into the annoyances of the character of Aunt Alice, I wanna note something I didn’t pick up on at first read.

Wade has a surprising aptitude for repairing technology that he mostly demonstrates here. He pretty much fixed up his laptop out of spare parts and gave his mom a laptop he put back together for Christmas. It’s what she was listening to when she died. Wade even says he’d find, fix and sell old computers and game consoles for food vouchers. It’s a detail that gets lost in the shuffle when the actual hunt takes place, most likely because it’s a virtual world, but it’s actually kind of neat to see a character who is supposed to be a nerd display a genuine skill that isn’t just knowing pop culture.

That’s sort of an underlying issue with the nerd culture of this time. At some point, nerdom shifted from being smart in a concrete sense (having knowledge in a STEM field) to having a deep knowledge of some sort of “nerdy” topic, usually sci-fi/fantasy works, comic books, video games, etc. It used to be that being a nerd not just meant you wore a t-shirt with a Doctor Who quote or a Triforce on it, but that you were a highly-graded student with technological or scientific skills to back up the knowledge.

Hell, it goes into something I feel is a problem of the overall book that none of the characters’ interests feel unique. It’s just being the homogenized generalist “nerd” when people are going to prefer certain types of media over another. Some people are movie buffs, some are music snobs, some are hardcore gamers and some are otaku. Making Wade a character who leaned more on the gamer side, but had an affinity for tinkering with hardware could’ve given him a distinct flavor. Hell, it’d be kind of cool to have him use that mechanical skills to find ways to give him an edge in the OASIS. I dunno, this is just food for thought here and it’s been a while, so maybe this stuff does pay off, but it gets drowned out in comparison to his more “impressive” ability to recite Monty Python sketches.

In short, we need more Billy Cranstons and less Sheldon Coopers.

Anyway, onto Aunt Alice. Immediately, Wade makes it clear how she’s not a good person. She took in Wade purely for extra vouches, she’s described as “a malnourished harpy in a housecoat” and her first real act is to take Wade’s laptop in order to pawn it, bringing in her boyfriend to threaten Wade.

I dunno, maybe it’s just me, but this just feels like now Ernest is just making as much an angst sandwich as he can in order to really pile on sympathy for Wade. But it feels excessive once you’re getting to “ has an abusive guardian.” It feels like it should be enough that he lives in a slum and lost both his parents, but Wade felt he really had to throw in the evil aunt who takes all his stuff.

It also doesn’t work because they’re basically in the same boat. They’re living in the Stacks and are scraping to get by, so this isn’t random cruelty on Alice’s part. It’s not like Wade’s living in a comfortable middle class suburbia and is being denied fun or the item has some sort of sentimental value. It’s a junker laptop, he even admits he has two spares in his hideout.

It doesn’t help that this whole scene goes nowhere. Wade and Alice don’t reconcile their difference, Alice doesn’t get some sort of comeuppance for this. She just dies midway through the book and there’s nothing particularly cathartic in that either as she’s a casualty of the villains’ machinations. Before you get to thinking about the death therefore being tragic, don’t worry, I’ll get to it.

Anyway, we get some more worldbuilding on the Stacks. Basically, a poverty boom caused a large housing shortage and the solution was to maximize use of ground space by stacking trailers on top of each other and then connecting them together with metal scaffolding. We’re even told that the scaffolding is so shoddy that the stacks can possibly collapse, sending them crashing to the ground and taking over stacks with them.

Once again, this is some good worldbuilding here. The idea of these sorts of monoliths of junk, held together with duct tape and prayer that could give out at any time really add to the atmosphere of how bleak the world is. Helped by the fact that the stacks are also a place where you’re likely to get jumped by dangerous and desperate people if you get detected. It’s this stuff that holds up like this that really makes the bad parts of this book all the worse.

Wade makes his way out of his aunt’s place and climbs down the scaffolding, avoiding the metal staircase and its constant noise. It’s a solid bit of visual and it continues the idea of Wade having actual tech skills by bringing up him coding an Atari game. Points are lost by making this a “gunter rite of passage” instead of just being something he did because he found a 2600 and needed something to play on it, which I feel would’ve been a better display of character. Maybe play into an idea of Wade having a dream of being a programmer, inspired by the works of James Halliday.

We do get one character who actually seems like they’d have good rapport with Wade. Mrs. Gilmore, a sweet old lady who lives in one of the trailers below Wade. She’s actually one of the few people who is nice to Wade and lets him crash on her couch and because she grew up in the ‘80s, she’s able to answer Wade’s various questions on subjects. A mitigating problem in this dynamic is that Mrs. Gilmore is religious and since Wade is a card-carrying member of r/atheism, he clearly doesn’t see eye-to-eye with her. He does at least have the decency to admit he keeps his feelings on organized religion to himself.

Oh, and another check for Wade’s mechanical skills as he fixes Mrs. Gilmore’s OASIS. By the way, hope all of you enjoyed that paragraph I wrote out about Mrs. G. She’s pretty much out of the story and also dies midway through. We’ll get to that, but again, we see Ernest wasting good character ideas.

One would think someone who actually lived through the ‘80s would be a good character to have in your story where ‘80s nostalgia is the name of the game. To talk about her experiences during that time or something. Hell, at the very least, having a character who Wade doesn’t treat with disdain and who could act as a mentor figure to the troubled boy would be nice. Give him something to actually fight for given his “everything sucks and we’re going to die” outlook. I dunno, do something with the characters you establish, Ernest. You can cut a few references to Tron or whatever if it means you get to develop your characters.

Wade eventually makes his way down the Stack and out to his hideout, a cargo van in the scrap heap below that actually gets a good amount of description. There’s quite a few paragraphs into detailing in both the way the hideout is hard to find and all the ways Wade basically turned this van into a makeshift home base where he can use the OASIS in peace. He’s even got food rations and a Star Trek lunch box to hide his OASIS rig in. However, I’m gonna be petty and shit on Wade for the fact that he pours the milk in before the cereal. I know he’s making a powdered milk mix, but come on. At least find a mixing cup so you can pour the milk in.

Wade gears himself up and then logs in, using a stupidly long passphrase that’s a reference to The Last Starfighter. Man, at least make your passphrase 1-2-3-4-5! It’s the combination on President Skroob’s luggage!

Anyway, we get a title drop as Wade logs into the OASIS, ending the chapter.

Okay, so once again I’m in a position of finding this to be and okay start, but the cracks are starting to show. Wade is slowly showing his ass, but there’s still good worldbuilding and the ‘80s references aren’t entirely choking out the narrative. There’s even some promising ideas in there for Wade’s character. But it’s gonna start breaking down any moment.

Ready Player One: Prologue

 Prologue: 0000

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We kick off the book with our protagonist, Wade, hitting us with the news of James Halliday’s death. It also is the first inkling of Wade’s unpleasantly obnoxious personality as he starts going on about how the world has much bigger problems than the death of, as he put it, “one of the wealthiest people of the world.” Ya know, the sort of thing you’d see out of some smug teenager trying to seem above it all and how he’s “concerned” about real problems while pretty much doing nothing but tweet about how those problems exist. Wades makes a point of referring to the viewing public as “the unwashed masses” which is rich coming from a kid living in one of the trailer park Jenga towers.

So, skipping a bit ahead to talk about the one bit of worldbuilding that is pretty neat for the series; the Stacks. See, in the world of RPO, poverty has gotten to such an extreme that a series of trailers have been constructed on top of each other, stacked together, as it were. It’s a strong visual, and does give a real sense of the world Wade lives in. It feels more realistically dystopian in a time when the boom of dystopian YA novels were a touch more fantastical. Like, I could see something like the Stacks being a thing. It’s one of the few credits I’ll give to Ernest Cline as a writer. It’s a shame that it’s touched on so little in the book.

We do get some real important details about Halliday; he died a bachelor and left no heirs. His last will and testament was a video will, dubbed Anorak’s Invitation. I do like the touch of setting the will to Dead Man’s Party by Oingo Boingo. It’s a great little song and it actually feels fitting to the scene. If the rest of the book's references were this well-woven into the story, I’d probably not even bother with the blog.

We also get some real murky prose in terms of describing the extras in this video will’s presentation.

Halliday is at a high-school dance being held in a large gymnasium. He’s surrounded by teenagers whose clothing, hairstyles, and dance moves all indicate that the time period is the late 1980s. Halliday is dancing, too—something no one ever saw him do in real life. Grinning maniacally, he spins in rapid circles, swinging his arms and head in time with the song, flawlessly cycling through several signature ’80s dance moves.

The thing that drives me nuts is that the description just assumes you know just what ‘80s clothing, hairstyles and dance moves without any effort on Cline’s part. Along with that, it’s flavorless. I’m not confident in my own descriptive abilities as a writer, but the fact is that I could do a way better job of this. Describe the colors of the clothing, tell us what Wade thinks of the hairstyles. For a book that namedrops so much pop culture, the fact Ernest couldn’t even bother to name a single ‘80s dance move is baffling. The Running Man, The Cabbage Page, The Kid ‘n Play, The Worm, The Biz, hell, how about the friggin’ Moonwalk?! Ya know, the signature dance move of one of the biggest pop stars of the ‘80s?

Just like that, the credit I gave it for the use of Dead Man’s Party is lost as he can’t even follow it up with actual description work. We also get little footnotes about how the follow-up scene, Halliday presenting his will, is designed to evoke the film Heathers and I struggle to see the relevance that has beyond just Heathers being an 80s film. Unless Halliday is gonna declare how he loves his dead, gay self, this could’ve just been a simple presentation of Halliday reading out his will.

I’m nitpicking, really, this does kind of work to establish Halliday’s obsessiveness over the ‘80s, that he can’t even produce a video will for himself without making some sort of reference to the decade. Plus, it’s not like he can make reference to the video will from Brewster’s Millions since Horn made that for his sole living heir and Halliday didn’t have that.

Halliday lays out the conditions of his will; his estate, including controlling share of his company (Gregarious Systems Simulations or GSS) and a fortune of $240 billion, is in escrow until someone meets the condition to earn it. He tells us about the Atari 2600 game Adventure, the game which introduced that concept of easter eggs in gaming.

The game’s creator, Warren Robinett, had hidden his name in the game in a secret room accessible by a rare key, since programmers at the time weren’t credited for their work. It was done as a way to prevent them from being snatched up by competition and Robinett believes it also took away a bargaining chip from developers during negotiations. In fact, Activision was founded because many of Atari’s programmers left due to this practice.

It’s a strong conceit for a contest to claim a fortune, though there is a much better one that will get name-dropped later on. It’s mainly the one picked because Halliday thought it was really cool when he was young and wanted to recreate that experience within the OASIS.

Anyway, the basics of the easter egg hunt are as follows; there’s three keys to three gates, scattered throughout the virtual world of the OASIS. Go through all three gates, find the egg and you win. Thus begins Halliday’s Hunt, a years-long search for the fabled easter egg that would grant fortune and power to the one who locates it. With the hunt comes a renewed love of 80s pop culture, all in the name of obtaining the easter egg.

Now, the idea of a book steeped in ‘80s nostalgia wasn’t a bad idea in a vacuum. After all, nostalgia spikes like these happen all the time, usually an appreciation for works at least two or three decades previously. Nowadays, everyone’s doing looks back to the ‘90s and 2000s. However, the problem comes that the book itself is set not in a reasonable decade where VR technology is commercially available and 80s nostalgia is unreasonable. No, it’s set in the 2040s, a time where folks would most likely be nostalgic for media of the late 2000s and 2010s. It becomes harder to buy that in the six decades between then, that people honestly care unless it was for this contest. Sensibilities change, and often drastically, over time. Consider how often you hear people discuss how Blazing Saddles couldn’t be made today. At some point in Wade’s time, people will probably have the same discussions about, I dunno, Django Unchained.

I dunno, maybe I’m just talking a lot of nonsense, but the major hook for the book is this sort of nostalgia bait and it’s hard to believe that the fish would bite. It makes all the characters feel like they only care because there’s money on the table and that the second someone wins, it’ll just fade away and be forgotten. It’s a bubble, really.

The other thing that comes about is the proliferation of the “gunters” which is short for “egg hunters.” Gunters are the community that formed around finding the easter egg that have pretty much combed the OASIS, sharing all the various findings and oddities in the hopes of finding hints. However, the whole of the search goes cold until Wade finds the first key, the copper key.

The prologue ends on Wade relaying his mission statement with this book, written in first-person and relayed like a sort of autobiographical account. He intends to cut through all the rumor-spinning and dramatization of his story and give us the truth of how he won Halliday’s Hunt.

Honestly, despite the shallow worldbuilding and the dodginess of the main concept, the prologue isn’t a bad start. I do get a feeling in the book that Halliday was an important figure and a strong sense of the stakes of this whole hunt, especially since it took five years for anyone to even clear its first hurdle. It makes the promise of Wade to give us the full story actually seem like it isn’t a threat.

However, it is a threat. It’s a threat that you’re gonna be stuck with Wade for the rest of this journey. Strap in, folks. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

Insert Coin

 Insert Coin

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On August 16, 2011, Ernest Cline published the novel Ready Player One. Cline, whose previous writing credits included the screenplay for the 2009 film Fanboys, wrote what was essentially a love letter to ‘80s pop culture. The book tells the tale of a future 2040s, where pollution, climate change and overpopulation have only exacerbated, but the presence of the virtual reality simulator OASIS has given people an escape from reality. James Halliday, co-creator of the OASIS, has died and in his will announced a contest for his vast fortune and control of the OASIS. The story follows Wade Watts, an Oklahoma teenager living in poverty who, thanks to his vast array of pop culture knowledge, gains the lead and eventually wins the contest, wins the heart of the gamer girl Art3mis, and topples the sinister IOI corporation.

The book was highly praised upon initial release, winning an Alex and Prometheus Award (don’t worry if you don’t know what those are. Neither do I.) It was seen as a fun popcorn book, called “The grown-ups Harry Potter” and “Willy Wonka meets the Matrix.” In 2018, a film adaptation would be released, directed by Steven Spielberg, a fitting choice given the book’s love of ‘80s sci-fi. The film itself would go on to critical acclaim, getting a 72% score on Rotten Tomatoes and winning a Saturn Award, while also raking in $582 million on a $175 million budget. The resulting success would push Cline to write a sequel book, Ready Player Two, which would be published in 2020.

However, the book would go on in later years to build up a steady backlash, regarded as an adolescent power fantasy for young boys with an unpleasant air of misogyny around it, tediously pandering in its references and…

Well, it’s bad. Like, I know I’m not exactly an iconoclast here in striking down a decade old book, but I really just need to get all of this off my chest. I need to talk about this book in excessive, unrelenting detail because it annoys me. Its presence as a piece of literary fiction irks me to my very core and I want to just wring my hands around its non-neck and strangle it with mean words until all the anger seeps from my pores and I attain some form of serenity after all of this.

But since I don’t have the time, money, tech, ability or energy to release a massive, Quinton Reviews-style deep dive and because Mike Nelson already podcasted about this in his 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back, I decided that the best way for me to subject you all to the horrors of me overthinking about a crap potboiler from the early 2010s was to make a whole-ass blog.

So, welcome one and all to Ready Player None, a chapter-by-chapter rundown and analysis (emphasis on the anal) of Ready Player One and Ready Player Two. I’m hoping to keep this going on a weekly release schedule, but if events in real life get in the way, don’t be surprised if I miss an update or two. But for now, let’s throw in a few quarters and hit that start button.