The basic premise of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One is that of a great modern sci-fi story. In a post not quite apocalyptic but somehow affected by climate change world, the most popular pastime is a virtual reality video game accessible to all people. The game's creator, billionaire James Halliday, dies and leaves his fortune hidden somewhere within the game. Whoever finds the treasure gets the money. As an elevator pitch, it's tremendously effective. It makes all the sense in the world that Steven Spielberg is directing the film adaptation. Typically this type of treatment happens with worthwhile stories. Ready Player One stops being one worth reading after the tenth page.
There's plenty to be frustrated about in the novel. The dialogue, the character interactions, the lack of character development, the unimaginative story arc, the insensitivity to race. Let's start with the 80s references. Before Halliday passes, he publishes an almanac of all his interests, potentially with clues to the location of the keys that lead to the treasure. What is supposed to be a collection of personal interests is actually a summary of anything and everything culturally relevant during the 1980s. Here's what Cline gets completely wrong about how pop culture works. While it's not uncommon for a person to have interests across several mediums, it's close to impossible for someone to profess a love for an array of video games as accessible as Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and as obscure as text-based adventure games, coupled with obsessions with Ferris Bueller's Day Off and The Breakfast Club and then a craze for the band Rush. There are people that admit to liking everything, but someone, let alone a video game designer egotistical enough to publish a book of all the shit he likes, would never like everything. All the name drops of 80s phenomenon are cheap pulls for nostalgia for, one would assume, 40+ year olds looking for young adult science fiction? If anything, it makes the film production that much more difficult and expensive, given all the clearances.
The obsession with the hunt and as a result the almanac results in the modern world becoming entirely obsessed specifically with 80s movies, music and TV. Again, that's not how pop culture works. There's a point in which Wade, the protagonist, bemoans the modern era corny sitcom that's constantly on TV and then chooses to binge Family Ties, a real television show. But how can you expect the writer to understand any of this when an actual sentence in this book describing Halliday's favorite directors goes, "Spielberg, Lucas, Tarantino...and, of course, Kevin Smith." Cline also wrote the movie Fanboys. Do with that information what you will.
There are three keys that lead to three gates, the last of which guards the treasure. It's a pretty standard storytelling structure. Whenever the players are stuck solving answers to clues that lead to the next key, however, there's no callback to something previously established or reference to lore established within the universe. Every single time, Wade simply remembers some video game that had never been mentioned previously or some other random trivia from the almanac and that's it, he solves the riddle. Every time.
If you're trying to do a Hunger Games and put together a story that doesn't really make that much sense but has characters you can root for simply based on the fact that they're trying to win a contest and beat a villain – a corporation that wants to monetize the (currently free) video game, then fine I get it. It gets the job done. I don't totally fault you for ignoring some of the more interesting possible themes given the premises: the future of technology and virtual reality, consequences of lack of human contact, love in a virtual world, racism in virtual reality, class issues in the real world. Why bother with those topics when the dialogue reads like it was written by a child, or someone that never attended a school, or spoke to a member of the opposite sex as a teenager, or participated in any sort of competition? Why even touch on how pop culture permeates in a world in which so many choose to exist in a virtual setting when a scene describes Wade downloading a how-to-dance tutorial for his avatar so the avatar can appear to be moving to the music correctly and this is viewed by others as something that is cool to do. Fuck this book.
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