Ernest Cline - Ready Player One

I played squash recently with someone when I mentioned that I was reading David Gibbins’ Atlantis and they mentioned that I might enjoy Ready Player One. The movie had just come out and I was also told that it was wildly different from the book and that if I was going to watch the movie, I should read the book first. So I did.

The general premise is, this crazy genius, James Halliday, creates this thing called the Oasis which is a virtual universe that people log in to play games, do jobs, go to school and essentially do anything except for eat and sleep. It’s almost where computer games are heading now we have VR headsets, only expanded to cover more of our general livelihood.

In the book, the real world is going to shit with wars, poverty and famine. This is summed by the cover of the book which shows mobile homes stacked on top of each other to increase the population density and cater for the ever widening rich/poor divide.

Anyway, in terms of the driving force behind the story, Halliday dies and leaves no heirs so he starts a contest to find keys in his game world. Whoever finds all the keys gets full control of the Oasis – so essentially becomes the richest person in the world.

There were a couple things that irritated me about the movie, which I’ll throw in here as it’s relative but first, the book. Now in terms of story, Ready Player One is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It does that thing where it drags you in, gets you invested in the characters and makes it difficult to put down. The arrogance of the antagonist makes you want him to lose and the characters are both engaging and charming in their own ways.

That’s not to say it’s a well written masterpiece though. There are several issues I had which unfortunately broke the flow somewhat. In hindsight, I should have ignored them and carried on, but I can’t do that anymore.

The most glaring of these was the time-continuity throughout the book. At some point, weeks would go by in a sentence without any real clues toward the passage of time. Then time will move back three days, then forward a day to the point where it became impossible to know what day of the week it is. Maybe it’s got something to do with the destructive capability of computer games on our perception of reality, who knows. On the bare face of it though, it looks like bad writing.

Halliday is obsessed with 80s culture and a lot of the references in the book reflect this with games like PacMan, Tempest and Joust making prominent appearances. However, there are certain elements that cross over into the 90s. References to directors on page 62 that only really rose to prominence in the 90s and some didn’t make an impression until the 2000s. It seems like a strange choice when there were a lot of movies released during the 10 years that comprised the 80s. This is a minor point though and it annoyed me more in the movie when it states that James Halliday’s favourite game was Goldeneye, a game released in the mid nineties for a console that didn’t exist in the 80s!

I also found it odd that all Wade can do in the Oasis is go to school because he doesn’t have any money. It’s like EA came in, bought out the Oasis and then monetised the whole thing. I would have thought that especially for a character like Halliday, this would have been the exact opposite of how he wanted the Oasis to work, and it feels like part of the premise of the movie – stopping the evil protagonist from gaining control of the Oasis – is made almost redundant by this fact.

When I thought about it a bit more, it seems that Wade’s inability to go anywhere other than school in a universe of infinite possibilities, it merely a device to drive the story and it’s really weak when you think about it. The movie didn’t create this problem and doesn’t have Wade confined to school so while parts of the movie annoyed me, parts of it are better too.

Another example of things done to drive the story, when you get to page 208, Artefacts are brought up for the first time stating that they’ve been around since the start of the Oasis. This again feels very much like, ‘I need to do something to move the story on… so… Artefacts?’ It could have gone by unnoticed if done differently but it’s at the start of chapter, 208 pages into a 374-page book so feels like an afterthought. Not as bas as some of Stephen King’s Dark Tower decisions though, and there isn’t an author note to justify them either.

One more contrasting point from the movie is the character of Art3mis. A main part of the book is that Wade believes that the Art3mis avatar looks like her real-life counterpart – this is true in the book but in the movie, the avatar is an alien. I can see absolutely no reason for this. The movie also rushes through the premise of the Oasis making it so anyone who hasn’t read the book will struggle to know what’s going on. Lastly, there is no relationship building between Art3mis and Wade in the movie. He just sees her one day and the next thing you know they are best friends. It condenses the story from the book for no real gain or reason.

There – movie whine over.

As I said at the start, Ready Player One is an imaginative story with some great characters. It’s just a little rough around the edges.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline was published by Arrow Books in 2012. RRP £8.99 (Paperback)