Book Review: Ready Player One novel by Ernest Cline

As the title suggests, this is a review of Ready Player One, the novel by Ernest Cline. There's a movie based on this novel with the same name, directed by Steven Spielberg but I've not watched the movie so I won't be reviewing it here. Based on reviews elsewhere, it seems that the movie is different from the novel. I won't be examining the differences here. What I want to do is to comment on the novel and the ideas, technology and situation presented in it.

First, let me state that I listened to an audiobook of this novel read by Wil Wheaton. Yep, same guy as the one mentioned in my previous review on Armada, by the same author. Thus, I had no problems with some of the names of the characters. I read some reviews on the Internet about Ready Player One and this seems to be the main bugbear of some readers.

The novel is based on the Quest, one of the nine basic plots in fiction writing. Protagonist Wade Watts (avatar name: Parzival, after the Grail Knight Percival) is a gunter (Easter Egg Hunter) who is looking for an Easter Egg (a hidden surprise in a videogame) left behind by James Halliday, the co-creater of the OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation). Halliday left a fortune of 260 billion dollars (which included shares in Gregarious Simulation Systems (GSS)). The person who found the Easter Egg would also have control over the OASIS. This last bit led to a rival corporation called IOI (Innovative Online Industries) employing a massive number of people to hunt for Halliday's Egg. Thus, we have three main groups of people hunting for the Egg: individuals (like Wade and his friends), groups (gunter clans) and a rather unscrupulous corporation, IOI.

An important point here is that IOI wants control of the OASIS because they wanted to monetize it. The OASIS, as designed by GSS, was an open source virtual reality network where people could do anything that they did in the real world: shopping and buying stuff, interacting with other people, playing games (alone or with others), attending school, even virtual sex. Access to the OASIS was a nominal 25 cents via computers. IOI wanted to change that. They wanted to charge more for access and make the OASIS a closed playground they can milk for the greatest profit. The gunters opposed that because IOI plans would mean the end of the OASIS (literally).

Not that GSS didn't make money off the OASIS. In fact, GSS made so much money through the OASIS that James Halliday and Ogden Morrow, the two owners of GSS, became billionaires. The OASIS was such an integral part of the future society (roughly 2040s) that its currency, the credit, became legal tender for real world transactions too. You can buy real world objects (such as a pizza) through the OASIS and pay credits to have it delivered to your doorstep. Shades of cryptocurrencies here, even though that phrase didn't appear in the book.

How did GSS make money through the OASIS? The OASIS was divided into many planets. Each planet is a unique place coded by either GSS or other programmers (remember, it's open source). Travel on planets was handled by vehicles (ranging from simple cars to hovercrafts to airplanes) and teleporters. If your avatar can't afford these, you can walk or run, which is free but time consuming. Travel between planets was done via starships, which can be designed as anything from an X-wing fighter (Wade used one of these) to the starship Enterprise. There were also star gates which allowed faster travel between planets. All this transportation cost credits. Vehicles had to be purchased by earning credits in the OASIS or (I assume) by buying OASIS credits using actual fiat currency. Again, this sounds similar to what's happening now on steemit.com through games such as Steem Monsters. Users were also charged for using teleporters and star gates. All these transportation fees became GSS's profits. GSS also made money through selling virtual real estate (entire planets!) and stuff (the aforementioned vehicles and other equipment). Imagine being the Game Master in a role-playing game and actually selling all the equipment listed in any of the books for actual currency and you'll see how GSS made a fortune. All this in an open source network! IOI thinks that it can make even more money through the OASIS by making it closed source. I think it's a pipe dream.

It was interesting to see that although IOI employed millions of people in the hunt for Halliday's Egg, they were not able to make progress for 5 years, the point where the story started for Wade Watts. Wade, together with his friends Aceh (pronounced 'h') and Art3mis became the first few people to find and solve the first key of the puzzle of Halliday's Easter Egg. After that, the pace of the novel quickened as the keys were solved one by one. At every step of the way, Wade and his friends were shadowed by IOI who had decided to follow them to the keys. Despite its tremendous resources, IOI couldn't decipher the puzzles themselves.

The search culminated in a huge battle (naturally). There's an interesting fight here between Wade and Nolan Sorrento, the head of operations at IOI. I won't mention it so that the surprise is not spoilt. This big fight was not in the movies so you'll have to read the book (or listen to the audiobook) to find out what it is. After the fight, Wade was able to obtain the final key and solve the puzzle. He was handed the 260 billion credits and control over the OASIS (in the form of a Big Red Button). His avatar also became the most powerful one in the OASIS and he was able to kill all of the Sixers' (employees of IOI involved in the hunt) avatars and resurrect his friends' avatars and restore their equipment.

In case anyone reading this thought it was a foregone conclusion, let me mention that IOI cheated outrageously. Everyone in the OASIS was only allowed to have one avatar under one account. You can only control your own avatar and you were not allowed to control other avatars. IOI used a hack which allowed any one of their Sixers to control any other's avatar with a quick switch. Thus, every IOI avatar had access to the talents of multiple experts. Despite all that, they were still reduced to following others (as I mentioned previously). Makes you wonder what all the IOI employees did in the prior 5 years.

There were other fascinating aspects of the world described in Ready Player One. It was implied that there was an economic collapse caused by an energy crisis. The crisis also reduced many people to poverty, dependent on government handouts to survive. Jobs were scarce and difficult to obtain. At one point, Wade created a false identity for himself that had multiple degrees. Despite that, he could only get a job as a lowly customer service executive. Again, shades of the future?

In the book, Wade also took a trip from his hometown to Columbus, Ohio where the headquarters of GSS was located. He rode in an armoured electric bus through the highways, passing through various lawless lands. Sounds like Car Wars to me! The bus had a wireless connection to the OASIS so most passengers, including Wade, spent their journey in the OASIS. I would assume that the bus also had drones capable of defending it from anyone who dared to attempt to hijack it. There was also mention of rare electric cars roaming the rather empty roads. Ready Player One was written in 2011, before the Tesla Model S was released for sale in 2015. So the world in 2040 still moves along, slowly and rather painfully, towards an oil-less future.

The role-playing game potential of this book is tremendous. I can imagine using different systems to represent the real world and the OASIS. Avatars in the OASIS level up over time so you would need a class and level system, such as D&D (any edition) or Pathfinder for adventure in the OASIS. The real world could be represented by a different system which does not use a class and level system such as Savage Worlds, GURPS or even Fate Core, to name a few.

To conclude, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in role-playing games, movies, videogames, puzzles or adventure. If you find it difficult to read the names of the characters, I suggest listening to the audiobook instead. The narration and pace by Wil Wheaton was great and he even managed to read, with an imagined straight face, the sections about himself as an old geezer in the OASIS. See if you can catch the reference!