If I could pay you in valuable rare artifacts like Hayata’s Beta Capsule or Fyndoro’s Tablet of Finding, I would. At the very least I would send your avatar some OASIS credits, even though I’m only a third level noob who’s never ventured far beyond the planet Ludus.
After spending the past few days glued to my Kindle vicariously living out both the real world and in-game adventures of Parzival–which felt a little like being logged into the OASIS myself–I can finally join all you cool kids who’ve become disciples of Ernest Cline and find myself wondering why I didn’t read his book sooner. I understand what you mean now when you say Ready Player One was written just for geeks like me. Well, geeks like us.
Awesome fan art/illustration by Lerms
With its hundreds of references to 80s pop culture and video game history, the book playfully poked my nostalgia at every turn on top of sucking me into its incredibly entertaining story. I found the concept of the OASIS especially relatable as an ex-WoW player who used to spend an unhealthy amount of time ignoring her problems in the real world while logged into a virtual one.
Beyond using famous geek movie and video game landmarks (War Games! Pac-Man!) as a backdrop to tell one hell of an adventure story, Cline also warns of the dangers of spending all our time in artificial worlds. The dystopian scenarios he describes occurring just a couple of decades into our future seem all too possible, given our addictions to technology, entertainment, and over-reliance on huge corporations. Who doesn’t want to be able to just pay a monthly fee to escape into a realistic world where we can be whoever and whatever we want? ShezCrafti would be a 99th level Ninja Turtle. (Who can also fly for some reason.)
Ready Player One surprised me by being well-written, clever and original despite being based on and inspired by hundreds of other media properties. It’s like the author put everything geeks my age care about in a blender and out came a smooth, delicious story milkshake. Mmm, milkshakes… Now I’m thinking about milkshakes.
By the end of the book I had grown to love the three main characters, Parzival, Art3mis and Aech so hard, even after I found out that Aech is really–
Sigh. Fucking IOI.
ShezCrafti’s Rating:
10 out of 10 stars.
