Ready Player One

Ready Player One is a story on several levels: A classic adventure of good against evil; a story of young love; a cautionary tale about the progress of technology; and a fun love-letter to 80s pop culture. Geeks of a certain age will appreciate the nostalgia, but I’m not sure that the rest of this story is satisfying enough.

Set in 2044 on a spoiled Earth, all the regular predictions of global warming, lack of oil, over-crowding and general misery have come true. Our hero, super-geek Wade Watts, spends most of his time inside a great virtual reality game called the Oasis. In fact, most of the planet spends most of their time in there as it’s far more fulfilling than the miserable life they’re living in the real world.

The Oasis is pervasive, ubiquitous and free. Much like a vast modern day MMO, anyone with the necessary equipment can plug in and do whatever they like in there, and play out a role as whatever person they would really like to be. But the Oasis is also more than just a massive virtual simulation. It’s also a puzzle, a puzzle left behind by its deceased creator James Halliday–an uber geek with an obsession for 80s pop culture.

When Halliday passed away, a video was played to everyone in the Oasis explaining that he had hidden an easter-egg inside the simulation, leaving tricky clues on how to find it. Whoever finds the egg would inherit his fortunes and take control of the Oasis. The whole world, including Wade, becomes obsessed with the hunt for the egg, but after five years and no progress, interest wavers. Until one day Wade finds the first of three hidden keys which sets him on the adventure of a lifetime.

The story that follows is pretty formulaic, but what made it fun for me was the incredible amount of references to 80s pop-culture, especially video games and films. As a kid in the 80s I spent a lot of time in the arcades playing every game they offered, so this aspect of the novel really pressed all my fond nostalgia buttons. I had great fun reading about all the different games that are part of Halliday’s Egg Hunt and remembering my own experiences with them. One game I used to play, Black Tiger, seemed little known at the time, so it was great fun to get a whole passage about this lost game.

Beyond the nostalgia however, the rest of the book is a bit hit and miss. There are some plot holes that make little sense, and an antagonist that’s so indistinct and poorly realised as to be nothing more than a huge cliché. The book ends up feeling like a series of info-dumps about 80s pop-culture interspersed with some story. It’s a real shame, because this could otherwise have been a great read.

The characterisation and plot works just fine for a fun action adventure of this type and skips along quickly. It’s just that it could have been so much more. If the author had put as much energy into the characters as he had the nostalgia, this would have been a much stronger book.

Ready Player One is light-hearted fun. I enjoyed it immensely for its nostalgia overload. But its lack of sense and flimsy characters make it much less than the sum of its parts.