This Is Just An 1,018-Word Dump All Over Ready Player One
The Off the Shelf series is where we talk about books we've read lately. A book is a really antiquated thing that people pretend to like when they want to sound smart, which fits the goal of this website quite nicely.
When I read a book, I want three things:
- A main character embroiled in a cause I care about.
- A vivid setting.
- An antagonist who feels like they can actually win.
In other words, a solid book makes you invest in the action, helps you imagine the world, and holds you in suspense. If the main character is involved for dumb, contrived, or vapid reasons, we don’t have a reason to follow his journey (whether they’re a traditional hero or not). If the world isn’t clear, then the book doesn’t make sense and the dynamics between the characters don’t have external impact. If the antagonist is soft and uninspired, there’s no threat to the main character, and thus another reason not to care. There are plenty of other key storytelling elements, but in terms of the main chunks of meat in this narrative stew, that’s what we’re cooking with.
Ready Player One is not a narrative stew. It’s not even a narrative broth. It’s a narrative glass of toilet water. And all you can cook up with that is a giant pot of human feces.
Here’s what the book’s about: A teenager in a dystopian future spends most of his waking life in a virtual reality. Since America is so dystopian, most other people do the same. The creator of the VR world dies, and he leaves behind a trail of clues in the VR world that ultimately lead to his entire inheritance (several billion dollars). Now, everyone on Earth is racing to follow the trail of clues and inherit the fortune.
It's a terrific premise, but it is positively wasted on boring, simple-minded characters and an almost baffling lack of conflict or tension.
The protagonist of Ready Player One is named Wade Watts, but that’s where the cool stuff ends. Wade is obsessed with hunting down the multi-billion dollar fortune, so he has made himself an expert on everything that the VR creator ever loved: 80s movies, classic video games, and progressive rock. Countless sentences in the book contain the some version of the phrase “I had mastered the game already” or “I had seen War Games 36 times, and had all the dialogue memorized” or “I knew the entire Rush discography, and could play the whole catalog note for note on guitar and electric bass.” All this is presented to be impressive or cool, but it never lands that way. It’s just super obnoxious. It’s geek-bragging, which is halfway boring already, but beyond that, Wade’s skills don’t even feel plausible. Wade is a teenager who has devoted perhaps a quarter of his life (4 years, maybe?) to this treasure hunt, and he claims to have dozens of video games mastered, scores of movies memorized line-for-line, and hundreds and hundreds of albums cataloged into his head. Every book asks us to suspend a little disbelief, but Ready Player One asks to the point of insult.
It wouldn’t matter though, if Wade’s motivation for winning the money went past just becoming super rich. Astonishingly, they don’t. He wants to win the inheritance because it will make him the richest man alive and he’ll have a chance to be with this girl he met online. You expect that motivation to evolve or at least mature, but it doesn’t. It’s a baffling choice that makes the book feel self-centered, self-congratulatory, and worst of all, utterly pointless. Why should we hope for a mean-spirited, too-competitive loner to become super rich and score the girl? It’s a shot at our standards to think we’ll go along with it. It’s lazy.
Speaking of lazy, the treasure hunt itself proves to be a GD cakewalk. Wade shoots to the top of the leaderboards early, and at the risk of spoiling the horri-awful ending of this wipe-your-crack-with-it excuse for a book, that doesn’t really change. Wade always seems to have the right killswitch that will bail him out of trouble, and he’s always equipped with the best armor and weapons and other dorkathon nonsense that will help him beat his competitors. Oh, and he has online friends in the VR world who are, like, the second-best through fifth-best players in the world, and they’re all helping him. You will never doubt for a second that Wade walks away with the cash. You will not be surprised. You will not be fooled. You will not be mislead. There’s no effort here.
Which brings us to Ernest Cline, the writer. Ready Player One is little more than self-promotion for its author’s own weird obsession with nerd culture. The book in fact feels written to be a nerd fantasy, where not only are video gamers rewarded for playing games all day, but they’re rewarded especially if that’s the only aspect of their life. They still score women, make money, and achieve worldwide fame. There isn’t a problem with making your book’s heroes untraditional and geeky, but there is a problem if you make them that way as an excuse to reel off your personal knowledge of all that geeky stuff. That makes the book about you, not your characters, and that’s repugnant. We might as well read Cline’s Wikipedia page instead, which I won’t link here, because he can burn his tongue on a Hot Pocket.
There’s an interesting question here of why uber-popular books like Ready Player One and Fifty Shades of Grey (and really, the former is little more than the latter for geeks) usually take the form of the writer’s most indulgent fantasies. Is that what people want to know about? Or read about? Do people read these books because they share those fantasies, too? I don’t really know. I’m kind of scared to keep thinking about it.
Look, Ready Player One is bad enough for its awful mechanics, but what makes me feel upset about it is how it functions primarily as a showoffish and conceited excuse for the writer to display his insufferable and haughty know-it-all tendencies. It’s bad enough he wrote a story that rewarded him for that. It’s worse that we all bought it, and rewarded him, too.