Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
It’s hard not to intro with this, considering the book more or less does… sets the vibe, what can I say. Hit “Play” already!!
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It’s 2am on a Sunday morning and I’ve just finished reading this incredible book. I started it on Friday… it was that good. I took only two breaks from reading this book (and each time it was hard to put it down and walk out the door). I left once to go see The Coup perform, where I saw something that I will most likely never ever see again in my life, Pam the Funkstress aka The Party Slapper using her boobs to spin records and the second break, a trip with an old friend to the San Francisco Street Food Festival. Both good breaks, but knowing that this book was sitting on my coffee table at home while I was out and about was no laughing matter.
Since my last posted book review in early September of last year, my life has changed. “Changed,” is putting it a bit lightly I suppose. It has been a roller coaster. I started a new job, made new friends, lost most of my friends to migration to far off cities (yes, Los Angeles, New York and Palo Alto are far off places), experienced life altering moments, became a more humble yet more generous, giving and confident man, became more ambitious, found a new best friend (2 if puppies count) and most importantly fell in love with the most incredible, beautiful, brilliant, caring and respectable woman I could ever imagine or dream of. Unfortunately though, things are in constant motion and right now I feel more lonely than I ever have. That best friend and love have disappeared from my life (sadly) and here I am, immersing myself into a world of books once again. Maybe you’re wondering why I’m telling you all of this, maybe not, but I think it stems from the fact that this book hit home a bit with me, for many reasons but two of those were the ideas of feeling “alone” and that knowledge of knowing when you’ve found someone that you love and want to share your life with. Mr. Cline has no idea how connected I feel to his protagonist, Wade Watts.
Wade Watts enters the OASIS to escape reality; I open up a book to do the same. The OASIS, a virtual world a la “Second Life” only far more advanced and unlike anything out there today, is a world where anyone can be whoever he/she chooses. By putting on some sort of crazy gloves and a ridiculously advanced virtual reality visor a user enters himself into a world of wizards, aliens and whatever else a 12 year old can imagine. But in the future that Watts lives in, the OASIS is more reality than the world outside. Having an escape mechanism isn’t the only similarity that I share with Watts, you see he’s also got “a serious cute-geeky-girls-playing-ukuleles fetish…” while I wouldn’t call what I’ve got a fetish by any means I certainly can appreciate this (it’s hard not to fall in love with Sophie Madeline). Wade is a loner, an outsider looking in, an unfortunate feeling that I share with him at this moment. He too found love, saw it escape from his grasp only to have it be rekindled (I dream…). We differ a lot too though, I don’t play video games, I have a great, loving relationship with my family and I actually do have some friends in real life.
Playing video games, inside or out of the OASIS, was Wade’s nerdy way of getting away from it all, “all I had to do was tap the Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away…” If only life were that way for all of us. But, when the founder of the OASIS dies, James Halliday, Wade and his online avatar/persona Parzival are thrust into the biggest video game easter egg hunt ever, one that would result in making the finder of the egg the inheritor of Halliday’s massive fortune.
Oh, but that’s only the beginning. Lucky for you, me and everyone else who picks up this book we are inundated from the very beginning with fond memories of 80′s pop culture, this really is the crux of the novel and is what will surely draw people into it (it had that affect on me). From John Hughes films, sci-fi favorites (think Star Wars, Star Trek and beyond), comic books, video games, tv sitcoms to cartoons. You see, the creator of the OASIS was infatuated with this era, and therefore the hunt for the three keys, which would lead one to the easter egg, involved extensive knowledge of everything 80′s.
Of course, once the hunt began, every man, woman and child scrambles. Each spending all day everyday locked up in the virtual world studying the 80′s backwards and forwards trying to find clues, which would reveal the location of that first key. Of course, with big money at stake, there’s always some evil out there lurking, working as hard and devilishly as possible to win that prize and in this case it’s the IOI, whose plan, once they win the money is to take over the OASIS and monetize it, dirty bastards. The race for the egg turns life and death, inside and outside of the OASIS.
Honestly, this book is a nerds/geeks wet dream. The references made in the book make it that much more fun for anyone that is familiar with the 80′s (the only ones I struggled with were the Japanese references and the movie Ladyhawke, embarrassing, I know). There are so many valuable lessons throughout the book that to try and share them here would be a most difficult challenge (though probably not as hard as defeating Pac Man’s 255 levels with a perfect score of 3,333,360 points). I will leave you with this though, at the end of the novel one character says to another that “…reality is real… Don’t hide in here forever.” Perhaps something I should take to heart.
