Book Review: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

This is the book I have prayed would be written for years. I’ve been tempted to try to write it myself, simply because it is the most insanely awesome, thought provoking, and terrifying premise I can conceive. And I’m very convinced its prophecies will become true.

The year is 2044. Overpopulation, combined with scarcity of resources from droughts caused by climate change, has essentially moved everyone down a social class. The upper class is now middle class, the middle class is now lower class, and the lower class is now impoverished. The impoverished are lucky to survive. Countrysides are full of bandits. Unemployment is at its highest ever been. In a nutshell, the good ‘ol days of the early 21st century are gone.

Except there is one ray of hope. One way to escape, to get back to the rich life. Better than that, to have whatever you want. To make all of your fantasies come true. To go anywhere. To have unlimited power. This is OASIS.

OASIS, the Ontologicaly Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation, is the nirvana of digital experience. It is free. It is an entire galaxy, full of every fantasy and real universe ever imagined: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Matrix, Narnia, Oz, Harry Potter, World of Warcraft. Every game before it has been combined to be in this huge simulation. Not only aimed at gamers, there are virtual shops. You can shop and have the items delivered to your door. You can go to virtual church. You can hang out in virtual chatrooms, which are simply virtual lounges. This is the end-all be-all videogame. It is a virtual reality machine, where the immersion is only limited by how much high-end virtual reality equipment you can afford. With top of the line equipment, players wear full body feedback suits, and can actually physically run inside of a giant hamster ball.

Don’t think its going to happen?

How about now?

OASIS isn’t just about shopping and gaming, it is the most powerful educational tool the world has ever seen. It contains all of the world’s books, movies, and television shows, for free. Not only that, but it is full of virtual schools. Students in rural areas just have to plug in, and they are in a virtual classroom. Not only is it more convenient, but it is more effective. Instead of having to draw on a blackboard, the teachers can actually take their students on historical simulations or create virtual science experiments for them to do at no added cost. Visiting ancient Rome is a lot more exciting than reading about it. There are no distractions either, since the school simulation simply blocks texting, email, and everything else out.

Inside OASIS you can be anyone you want to be. Any race, real or mythical. Any size. Any color hair. Any face structure. You can look like a supermodel or an actor. Its up to you. If you’re a 40 year old man named Chuck, you can be a 20 year old woman named Kate. If you’re an albino girl, you can be a tall black man. And no one will ever know, unless you want them to. It is a place to start over.

This is our future. Sounds pretty cool, huh? Well everyone in the book seemed to think so. Many of the players never left their homes. They never socially interacted in real life. They never had to. They could go to school in OASIS. They could work in OASIS. They could even order groceries in OASIS. Why should they go out into the real world and suffer, when they can have everything in the dream world?

This sounds a heck of a lot like the Matrix, doesn’t it? Except its self-imposed.

 

The Book

Source: venturebeat.com

I first heard of this book from Jamie Lewis; he recently did a book recommendation post. The novel follows Wade Watts, a poor adolescent who lives in a trailer park. The creator of OASIS has died, and will give anyone his entire fortune that can find a secret item he placed in the game. Wade, like almost everyone in the world, sees this as a way to prosperity, and begins to hunt feverishly for the item. The book follows Wade’s journey through the real world and OASIS worlds as he tries to find it. I’m not giving away any more of the plot, sorry. You can find a longer description at the Wikipedia entry or at the Amazon.com page

What I will say is that the book is incredibly engrossing. Even from the first page, I was hooked. There were hardly any slow parts. Reading it was like playing an amazing videogame: I would put the book down, and for a second, be disoriented as to where I was.  It was that good.

The only real flaws of the book happen towards the end, when the author makes his message very explicit, rather than expressing it with subtlety. Maybe that isn’t a bad thing, because everyone is sure to get the point. I just found it corny how he did it. There are also a few moments where the story is too happy to be realistic, in my opinion. Some places remind me of a Disney movie. It could use some good old fashioned Hemingway tragedy.

Implications

The book raises a philosophical question that I’m not sure if I can answer:

If you were given the chance for a perfect life, to constantly go on adventures and do whatever you wanted, but you had to do it virtually, would you?

Of course, your first instinct is no. But what if the simulation was so good that you couldn’t tell the difference? What if you were so disadvantaged in the real world that any escape would be better? If you were homeless, would you plug in so you could be a billionaire in the game? Could you face yourself, knowing that you weren’t really doing any of that? Knowing that you were living in your own mind, rather than in the world? Knowing that you may never have a real life, real friends, children?

The Nothing We Have Become

The Nothing We Have Become

What did you do today? Take a moment and list everything. Everything. I mean it. Now look at the list. Make sure you write in every time you checked your phone, email, or a website you like to look at (Reddit and Facebook, I’m looking at you). Also mark times when you were watching TV or listening to music (yes, TV and music in the background count).

Now think about your list. Are you proud of it? Did you get a lot done today? Did you have a fun day? Would you feel comfortable showing that list to someone you look up to, an idol? How about sharing it with the world?

Lets go a step further. Make another list, or review the list (if you’ve made it already) of things you want to accomplish in your life. Did anything you did today go towards that list? Don’t think you can opt out here by saying “well, I went to work, and I want to have a successful career, so I was working on that.” That’s crap and you know it. I’m talking about those amazing plans you have for your life, those dreams that you keep secret from everybody. That dream of climbing Everest, of traveling Europe on foot, of starting a business. Did you work towards those dreams today? Did you? Why not?

One day, you are going to die, and you’ll never get to do all this fun stuff you’ve got written down on your cute little goals list. Heck, one day, you are going to be old and decrepit and not get to do anything other than sit on your couch and regret all the stuff you missed because you decided to stay home to watch the new episode of Game of Thrones. That moment will come sooner than you’d think. Now, because you are procrastinating your life, it may not happen at all. Before you know it, you’re going to be staring death in the face, thinking about all those plans you had and feeling your heart being ripped apart from the sadness of knowing that you have failed yourself.

Maybe you haven’t failed society, or your family, which just want you to be a law-abiding self-sufficient citizen,

Have we really reduced the world to this? Source: hollywoodlife.com

but you have failed yourself. Apple and Microsoft sure will be happy; you’ve done exactly what they wanted. But lets forget them for a moment and think about ourselves. You’ve failed that ten-year old kid inside you that promised himself he would see the world one day. You’ve failed the six year old that was going to swim with sharks in 3 different oceans. You’ve failed the ambitious high school student that was going to own his own business. You’ve failed the bright college graduate who was going to be the the president of his country. You’ve failed the founders of the United States, who risked their lives so men could be free and not be tied down by the chains of inherited nobility, so that every man has an equal opportunity even if he wasn’t born royalty. You’ve wasted it away, entertaining yourself on Reddit and Netflix.

Odds are, if you are like most of us, you didn’t do much, if anything, today. Don’t feel bad, it isn’t just you. You aren’t being singled out for mediocrity. This is a trend enveloping the world. Nobody does anything meaningful anymore. We think we are doing things, but we have drawn a veil over eyes, pretending we are accomplishing things, while in reality, we are letting life pass us by. The more gadgets we get, the worse it becomes.

I wasn’t always such a Luddite. I used to play videogames for hours on end; I’d text literally nonstop for days; I would always have music playing in the background, no matter what I was doing. That buzz kept me warm and secure. Getting notifications and text messages validated me. I loved every minute of it, too.

But one day, everything changed. In an English class, we read a passage Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind about how music is crippling our youth’s thought processes. I interpreted the argument like this: as music gets better and better, and easier and easier to access, we listen to it more and more. As we listen to it more and more, we eventually have it playing during almost all of our free time. When we are listening to music, it is harder for us to have our own thoughts. This is especially true for music with lyrics; we think the lyrics, rather than thinking original thoughts of our own. Yes, we can block out the music and think for ourselves when it is playing, but it robs us of those silences which allow the brain to wander off and think on its own, or at least makes them occur less often.

I thought this whole music as a creativity-stifling agent was very silly, until one day I found myself completely

Not exactly exposing themselves to new experiences in the world, are they? Source: latino.foxnews.com

zoned out and focused on the song I was listening to. Normally, I would be okay with that, but then I realized that that was all I’d done that day. I might as well have been a vegetable, because I sure wasn’t doing or thinking anything on my own. I’d wasted an entire day giving myself the pleasure of listening to music, which was great in the short term, but costed the time I could have used to do something more constructive in the long term (write something, create my own music, make new friends, etc). My point is that it isn’t exactly on my life goals list to listen to music all day. But if that is your life goal, by all means, go for it.

Now combine the effects of music with TV shows, videogames, and Facebook posts, and imagine what this does to your thinking. Yes, I know you can still think, but your thoughts will often be interpretive rather than original. With so much information thrown at us, we often forget to actually think for ourselves. What happens? We get lost in our entertainment and leave our own lives on the shelf to collect dust. Our own dreams come secondary to the goals of the character in the show, in the game, or the lives of other people we see on Facebook.

This scares the heck out of me. With every new iPhone, with all of its great apps, and ability to watch television EVERYWHERE, and every advance in gaming technology, we get closer and closer to a moment where some easily-influenced young person decides that he’ll have much more fun on the internet or playing an online game than going out in the world and actually living. It is so much more fun being a level 90 warrior in World of Warcraft, rather than an awkward, gangly 17 year old high school boy. When domination is just a few hours and clicks away, rather than years of hard work away, of course we are going to be drawn into technological entertainment. But where does this leave our youth? How are we to fix this?

I realize the wonders of technology, and agree with the idea that we can benefit from exposing ourselves to new ideas, and that technology is a good way to do this. I just want people to be aware of how much the excess and unnoticed use of it is crippling our lives. T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men” sums it up concisely  especially if you think of it on a small, one-person scale (this is your life/world ending, as you let yourself sink to mediocrity and inactivity):

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

This post was inspired partially by this article, which humbled the heck out of me and made me realize how much time I waste on a daily basis.

I later found this one on the same site, which really inspired me.