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Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Ready Player One


I’ve just finished reading Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. You’ve probably seen it in bookstores or plugged on the interwebs. It’s been bandied about that this book is for geeks. I’ll just tell you right now that it mostly isn’t. It is, however, some kind of bastard child of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Hunger Games trilogy, and Neal Stephenson’s newest release Reamde. While that’s not praise, it isn’t necessarily criticism either.

Although the protagonist is ostensibly a seventeen-year-old dirt-poor uber-nerd (and if you don’t like my hyphens you have my permission to choke on a pineapple) he comes off as much, much younger.  It doesn’t help that the book is in first person.  It is hard to write an accurate representation of a person’s thinking process without sacrificing clarity.  Cline doesn’t sacrifice any clarity at all, and therefore we get a narrator who sounds earnest, wide-eyed, endlessly patient with the reader, unbelievably sincere, and… nice.  This, too, doesn’t necessarily make for a bad book; what it does do, however, is set itself at odds with the obsessive hacker shut in that our narrator is supposed to be.  I think this is not intentional as much as it is a consequence of RPO’s status as Cline’s freshman novel.  But, for all that it isn’t believable, it did make the novel interesting to read.

This is where the novel became linked up with the Hunger Games in my mind.  Parzival of RPO is uncannily like Katniss of HG.  They are the poorest of the poor, who have had injustice done to them all their lives, who out of dire need have cultivated arcane skill sets, who have been thrust into an increasingly deadly situation, and who are inexplicably, unbelievably, appallingly unscarred.  The shittiness of their lives simply hasn’t affected the way they think, the way they speak, the way they react to new situations, the way they engage in relationships, the way they behave under pressure—they aren’t nasty, or selfish, or particularly damaged, or bitter, or defeatist, or any of the things we expect them to be.

Again, though, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Think of them as the anti-Harry Potter.  Harry Potter (whose shitty early life actually does make him periodically grouchy, bitter, defeatist, and irritating) is not the most endearing character in the world.  Most of the time he deserves to be slapped.  Harry Potter is a much more realistic character.  He rages against people who want to help him and sulks when things don’t go his way.  His poor upbringing leaves him stunted.  And that’s realistic.  It just isn’t always pleasant.

Now, we could call that a fault and chalk it up to Cline’s inexperience; it’s probably true that Cline didn’t intend for his character to be unrealistic.  But what is interesting is what it does to the novel.  Just like Hunger Games, Ready Player One has a grim setting that is tempered by a narrator who doesn’t really let us focus on it.  Now, HG is a little more concerned with that grimness than RPO, but we really care about Katniss and the choices she faces.  That’s the heart and soul of the book.  The grimness is really just setting.  It isn’t the point.  RPO sucks even more of the grimness right out of the terrible world it is set in.  We simply don’t care about it.  In fact, we can’t even form an emotional connection to it.  The best thing is that this is actually the whole point of Cline’s setting.  In a world-wide virtual-reality MMO, we can’t really care about the real world.  The game takes up all of our emotional investment.  Cline’s narrator, intentionally or not, doesn't treat the real world like it matters.

The plot is a contest to find the ‘golden ticket’: an Easter egg hidden by the game’s creator which will empower the finder with ownership of the Wonka Chocolate factory video game company.  The game designer is reclusive, strange, and a genius in his chosen field.  We see very little of him, except through the vast pop-culture and video game knowledge of our hero, who belongs to a group of five treasure seekers (yes, one for each of Wonka’s original golden tickets).  Their competition is a soulless multinational corporation that will pervert the game to their own ends, and that even goes so far as to pervert the Chocolate Factory narrative by sabotaging the efforts of other treasure hunters.

I confess, the only way the book parallels Reamde is its fascination with the reality-influencing possibilities of the MMO.  Reamde doesn’t rank that highly on my list of Stephenson novels, but it is still a vastly more realistic, complicated, interesting world.  Reamde looks at what a future MMO can do to the real world.  RPO uses it as an excuse for video game culture masturbation celebration.

But really, though, the key to RPO is its audience.  It has been misjudged, in my opinion, because it is a book for people who don’t know about the culture it celebrates.  It is a book for people a few years younger than me, people who don’t know about Rush, ‘80s anime, and Atari.  (Heck, I was born at the very tail end of this era—the Atari was obsolete before I was even old enough to manipulate my joystick.  Hehehe.)  It really isn’t a book for adults.  But even though it isn’t a book that I particularly liked, there is something sweet about it; the way that it sends up a little moral at the end is particularly cute.  What Ready Player One is, really, is an older, wiser nerd telling a younger one to go outside and meet a girl for a change.

-Sleepyhead

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