Ready Player One
Introduction
Wade Watts is finishing his last year of high school. He’s poor and has no prospects. His parents are dead and he lives with his junkie aunt in a trailer park. The year is 2044. The seas have risen and the displaced people including Wade are crammed into high-rise trailer parks. The only way out is to win a contest for a billionaire’s fortune. The contest started five years ago but no one has won it yet, so Wade is determined to win it to secure his future.
Summary – Halliday
The contest was created by the eccentric co-creator of the OASIS, James Halliday. The OASIS is a virtual reality system using a Wi-Fi unit, glasses, and gloves. Halliday’s company called Gregarious Simulation Systems (GSS) builds the units and distributes them for free to everyone in the world. The company makes money through paid add-ons. The OASIS provides education, entertainment, and jobs to the masses. All school classes are held in virtual classrooms.
When Halliday dies the contest is opened. The first person who solves his three riddles and completes the three gates will collect his entire fortune. The clues started in a video that Halliday had posted after his death. Halliday loved the 80s since it was the time of his youth. He fixated on classic video games, sci-fi and fantasy novels, and movies.
Summary – Gunters
The people who studied the era to win the contest were called gunters. After five years of many people trying and not solving the first riddle, only the gunters still attempted to solve the contest. Wade is one of those gunters under his username of Parzival. His best friend in OASIS, who he has never seen in real life, is called Aech and they share knowledge of everything about the 80s. Wade’s crush is on a girl who he knows as Art3mis. The gunters try to win the contest singly or in a clan.
Things change when a corporation called IOI is formed to specifically win the contest. They want to use the fortune to take over OASIS and make it a paid platform. The gunters hate this and call the corporation sixers. Wade and his friends vow to win the contest before the sixers can win to preserve the OASIS as they know it. It will be difficult because the sixers have the money and will do anything to win.
Recommendation
Ready Player One is a great book. I cannot give this novel an unbiased review. I was hooked when The Tomb of Horrors became important to solving the first puzzle. The Tomb of Horrors, which was published in 1978, is a module for the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons is a paper, pen, and dice roleplaying game that came out in the late 70s and early 80s. I remember playing that module as a dungeon master in 1983. Other media that is featured in the puzzles include Zork, a text-based computer game, The Dungeons of Daggorath, a role-playing video game, Black Tiger, a hack and slash arcade game, and Joust, a multiplayer video game. Movies used in the contest were Wargames, Bladerunner, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The album by the band Rush called 2112 from 1976 was also important.
The author weaves the 80s nostalgia throughout the book. I liked the kids and their mission. There were very few missteps in my opinion. There were too many info dumps early in the book. It provided important information but stopped the plot. Having a corporate evil antagonist was cliché like the government in the movie E. T. I felt that there should have been a further reveal for Art3mis at the end of the novel. It was a missed opportunity.
Other Media Connections
Other computer games that I think would fit in with Ready Player One are the Space Quest series by Sierra Games and Wizardry, which seems like a computer game version of the Dungeons of Daggorath. Video games that I liked from that time were Double Dragon, Galaga, Gauntlet, Dragon’s Lair, and Space Ace. I think that the music of Blue Oyster Cult would have fit more with the theme of the book, especially the songs about the Imaginos concept.
This picture has some of my memorabilia that is featured in Ready Player One. They are The Tomb of Horrors module for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, the record album by the band Rush called 2112, and my VHS copy of the Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Links
Link to Goodreads page for Ready Player One
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9969571-ready-player-one
Link to review of Armada by Ernest Cline