Ready Player Book Report

What if the real world sucked? Sucked so hard that no one lived in it. Everyone dons a visor and special gloves and is whisked away into an OASIS that started as the most elaborate MMO ever made and became some sort of super realistic version of Second Life. When we’re not the only ones fighting we fight to get there first.

Wade Watts is your typical unpopular, overweight, and poor protagonist with a wonderfully alliterative name. Wade’s character is pretty two dimensional, he’s obsessed with a game wide contest that mostly resembles Willy Wonka’s (I see what you did there) search for an heir and escaping whatever analog life he has. We learn through his routine that the world is in disarray; there are mobile homes stacked on top of each other in future slums, everything worthwhile seems to be done in an online environment, and he’s stupidly obsessed with the 80’s.

The universe setup in this novel is extremely well done and thought out. The actions of the few real world characters convey the dire state of the economy and values of the common man. Almost half of the story is world crafting and Wade’s quest through the first stage of the contest, and I was satisfied with where everything is going. At one point I was pretty convinced this will be a movie. Then the second half of the book happened. Deus Ex Machina is a literary term you remember from High School English class that involves the writer using some sort of divine intervention to explain themselves out of a corner, it translates to “God from machine” for crying out loud. This is Deus Ex Machina the book. Almost every problem presented is explained away within a few pages of its introduction, aside from some clever foreshadowing that involves arcades and quarters that made me grin when I figured it out before the resolution.

I mentioned the 80’s earlier. I was born in the 80’s and remember a bunch of these references, but there is a line. It’s obvious that there was a mountain of research done to cross check facts and relevancies but all of that knowledge is presented in lists. The references were fun at first; the first page of the story quotes Bill Murray in Ghostbusters! There are several witty “stealth” references that escape over exposition (the Bill and Ted phone booth) but they’re few and far between. So what started as cheeky Psych-like jabs turned into chunks of text you could probably skip and miss nothing. George R. R. Martin loves lemon cakes and capons; Ernest Cline loves the 80’s. This is overkill in the highest order.

I hate to see a promising story turn so hard downhill at the midpoint. The only reason I kept reading was from the interest in the world that took place outside of OASIS, and seemingly like its inhabitants we leave it behind once the video game truly begins. The central ideas are solid, and I wanted to like it; but in the end I can’t really recommend Ready Player One to anyone.