Ready Player One: Ernest Cline’s Treasure Hunt Through the OASIS and 1980s Pop Culture
It is the year 2044, and the real world has become a bleak place where hunger, poverty and disease are widespread. Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes this depressing reality by spending his waking hours plugged into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia where everyone has an avatar, and where you can live, play and fall in love on any of its thousands of planets.
Author: Ernest Cline
Title: Ready Player One (2011)
Format: English paperback (Arrow), 384 pages
Scope: Science-fiction adventure; basis of Steven Spielberg’s 2018 film; followed by Ready Player Two
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0099560437 (ASIN 0099560437)
The Ultimate Lottery Ticket
And like most of humanity, Wade is obsessed with the ultimate lottery ticket hidden inside this alternative reality. The founder of the OASIS, James Halliday, who died without an heir, has promised that control of the OASIS and his enormous fortune will go to whoever can solve the puzzles he has scattered throughout his creation.
For years, millions have struggled in vain to win the prize, knowing only that the puzzles are based on late-twentieth-century culture. Then Wade stumbles on the key to the first puzzle. Suddenly he finds himself up against thousands of competitors in a desperate race for the ultimate prize, a chase that soon takes on terrifying real-world dimensions and will leave Wade, and his world, profoundly changed.
A Dystopia Thirty Years Away
Ready Player One presents a dystopian world set only a few decades in the future. Society has collapsed, resources are extremely scarce, and poverty and slums have become the most common way of life. A young man with nothing sets out to find the three keys that will make their holder the sole heir to James Halliday’s will.
The hero chooses to isolate himself from the hellish world collapsing around him. Where? In an incredible alternative world that has become the prop of a rotten society: the OASIS, a digital world with everything he needs. The OASIS is not just a game; it is also where people hold remote work meetings, where companies have digital headquarters staffed by digital workers, and where millions of people spend their lives.
Keys, Gates and Gunters
Halliday’s contest is built around three keys, copper, jade and crystal, each of which opens a gate containing a further challenge. The players who devote their lives to the hunt call themselves gunters, short for egg hunters, and for five years nobody finds even the first key. Then Wade, whose avatar is called Parzival, cracks the first clue, and his name appears at the top of the world’s scoreboard. Overnight he becomes famous, and a target.
Friends and Enemies
Wade’s allies are people he knows only through their avatars: his best friend Aech, the witty blogger Art3mis, and the Japanese gunters Daito and Shoto. Against them stands Innovative Online Industries, a giant corporation whose employees, the Sixers, hunt in teams so that the company can take over the OASIS and charge for access. The contrast between the lone players and the corporate army, and the discovery of who his friends really are offline, give the story its emotional stakes.
A Catalogue of the Eighties
The challenges are drawn from Halliday’s obsessions: arcade games such as Joust and Pac-Man, films such as WarGames and Blade Runner, Rush albums and early text adventures, culminating in a tribute to the Atari game Adventure, which contained one of the first hidden "Easter eggs" in video-game history. Cline’s own love of this material, which he had already shown as the writer of the film Fanboys (2009), is infectious, although some critics found the endless references more catalogue than story. A sequel, Ready Player Two, followed in 2020.
Why Read It
It is a fast, fun and nostalgic read, especially for anyone who grew up with 1980s films, music and video games, and it asks a question that feels more relevant every year: what happens when the virtual world becomes more attractive than the real one?
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