Ready Player One

Ready Player One, a sci-fi novel written by Ernest Cline, uses the vastness of the geek universe to compose the base of its narrative. The book, however, is marked by one-dimensional characters and a shallow, boring story that fails to deliver anything more than glorified references.

The story takes place in a decrepit society dominated by mega-corporations, where hunger, war, disease, and the terrible consequences of climate change have become common afflictions in the lives of the common people. That is, it’s basically nowadays, but a bit worse. In this scenario, people’s only means of escapism is digital: the so-called “Oasis” is a gigantic MMO in VR, a free virtual reality software of unimaginable proportions that allows anyone to embody a custom-made avatar, live epic adventures and do whatever they want, sharing the same unending universe with all other players.

The protagonist, Wade Watts, is a poor, orphan boy who lives in the house of an aunt who can’t stand him. The only good part of his day is when he goes to the Oasis, where he takes part in a worldwide hunt for special keys. The thing is: when the creator of the Oasis, James Hallyday, died, he left his entire fortune – and even the keys to his company – to the first person who solves his in-game puzzles and acquire three unique keys inside the Oasis. To be able to accomplish this one must share his obsession with the geek culture of the 1980s.

To affirm that the novel is full of references to videogames, comic books, anime, movies, music, D&D, and what else worked as entertainment at the eighties is a euphemism: these references make up the foundation, the pillars, the furniture, the decoration, and the roof of the narrative. The characters discuss the demerits of Ladyhawke, play several Atari titles, become Ultraman, drive a Delorean, pay homage to Vonnegut, and order the same favorite drink as the protagonist of Highlander when visiting a bar. The references are part of their language, and they often dispute who knows the smallest detail of the manual of some old video game.

This obsession is reflected in the descriptions in the book, which is narrated in the first person. The protagonist, however, doesn’t avoid saturating the reader with his references to geek culture, sometimes inserting four or five in a single paragraph, almost like he’s constantly showing off his knowledge on the subject, which can rapidly become tiresome. Excerpts like this are common: “When I reached the bar, I ordered a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster from the female Klingon bartender and downed half of it. Then I grinned as R2 cued up another classic ’80s tune. ‘Union of the Snake,’  I recited, mostly out of habit. ‘Duran Duran. Nineteen eighty-three.’”

The narrative, however, cannot sustain this approach for too long as it makes a fatal mistake: it conveys the protagonist’s obsession, but not his passion. In other words, it makes clear the importance of that universe to Wade, who practically breathes the eighties, but fails to show why that time generates such fascination in the boy. It’s a problem of quality, not quantity.

The discussions about comic books, games, and movies, for example, although ever-present, are superficial. A good example is a debate Wade has with his friend Aech about Ladyhawke: the protagonist simply says the film is “good” and “an eighties classic”, pointing out the director’s other works and citing the name of the actors, while Aech accuses the movie of being “lame” and a “chick flick” (sigh). No one was expecting complex discussions about cinematography, sound design, and camera angles from these characters, but something less superficial, like at least a conversation about the movie’s characters, themes, and plot, was fundamental for the scene to have worked. After all, the more you like a subject, the more you want to know about it, and the debate between Wade and Aech – which still is one of the biggest and most complex in the book – doesn’t surpass the level of two teenagers with access to IMDB. They may have information about the movie, but they definitely don’t show love for the subject.

In the same sense, the scenes about Wade’s ability to solve Halliday’s puzzles end up ringing equally hollow. In one of them, for example, the boy needs to break the world record in Pac-Man. He then goes on to tell how he has read several strategies and studied several famous players to win, but never really gets into the strategies themselves. In other words, the narrative is emphatic in saying that Wade is good, but never really shows that.

As a character, Wade acts as a symbol of the problems that affect the whole novel, revealing to be an empty, disgusting shell when deprived of his geek mask. The protagonist is just a teenager full of hormones with an encyclopedic knowledge about the eighties and considerably sexist behavior, to the point that, after being rejected by a girl, he feels the need to replace her with a robotic sex doll, which basically reveals how she was smart to reject him in the first place.

The boy grows only when in opposition to the villain, a greedy company that plans to win Halliday’s contest just so it can start charging a monthly fee for access to the Oasis, which until then only generated profit via microtransactions. Wade argues that this would deprive the masses of their only remaining means of escapism in a harsh world. He also condemns the company’s proposal to end the anonymity in the game, defending that it’s a crucial thing for insecure people to be able to express themselves. The novel never discusses these issues, however, putting Wade as right and the evil company as wrong, wasting the potential of the subject matter: the problem of anonymity, which provides security for bigots, allowing them to spread hate speech without fear of being held responsible for their words, for example, is not even mentioned. Wade is good and heroic, and the company is bad and villainous. It’s that simple here.

The geek world is also romanticized without reservation: while groups of geeks immediately appear welcoming to their equals (as if) and being a geek automatically makes the person a hacker, the “hardships” the group has to endure are also constantly exalted: “You see, thinkers, inventors, and scientists are usually geeks, and geeks have a harder time getting laid than anyone. Without the built-in sexual release valve provided by masturbation, it’s doubtful that early humans would have ever mastered the secrets of fire or discovered the wheel.”

The narrative cannot even properly develop the political panorama of its universe. The Oasis, for example, offers free access to an education system of the highest quality, and there is even a social program that delivers the hardware for free to the people. Such a thing would be huge enough to shake up the status quo and diminish social inequality, but such consequences never seem to have come to Wade’s world, and the reason for this is not mentioned either.

The hunt for the keys is also formulaic and unimaginative, with puzzles that vary between being too obvious – the first – and too obtuse – the second – while the action sequences can only excite those who recognize the book’s many references. There are several reasons for this: the characters are flat, the action takes place mostly in the digital universe where nobody is in real danger, and the narrator, of course, is more concerned with pointing out that he knows the name of all the elements involved in the battle than in try to narrate it in an exciting way, always slowing down the pace with his explanations.

Finally, there is the problem of the inconsistency of the narrator’s voice in the prologue, which, despite being Wade’s, is different from the one used in the rest of the chapters: only in the prologue does he use footnotes to point out the numerous references in the text, relegating them to a secondary, unimportant position, which they definitely do not assume in the rest of the narrative. It would have been possible to argue that the change would symbolize the end of the character’s arc, reflecting the end of his obsessive behavior, if the rest of the book was not narrated in the past tense. That is, the Wade who writes the prologue is the same as the rest of the book, although his voice differs without any justification.

Sadly, Ready Player One ends up being devoured by its own narrative, failing to develop its premise, characters, themes, and universe, too busy getting lost amidst its endless references.

Review originally published in Portuguese on March 1, 2018.

July 10, 2020