Meet Wade Watts, or Parzival, as he’s better known online. Like so many otakus, Parzival uses the OASIS game interface to escape poverty, his mean aunt, and a world ravaged by pollution. But here’s the twist–five years ago, the game’s creator, James Halliday, died, leaving behind all 240 billion dollars to the person who can find it in game. In order to win the money, your avatar has to figure out the riddles and locations of all three keys and gates (copper, jade and crystal) just to obtain the game’s ultimate Easter egg.
Spoiler alert: Do not tread past this point if you haven’t read it.
Although there was much fanfare after this announcement, no one could figure it out five years after Halliday’s death. Parzival has spent nearly every waking moment studying Halliday’s life and his obsessions with ’80s pop culture just to figure out what the clue means. Soon, he becomes the first person to obtain the copper key and walk through the gates.
Hot on his heels are the people from Innovative Online Industries (IOI), a big corporation hellbent on taking the fortune just to monetise the game even more. IOI has employed many people to analyse Halliday and his obsessions, and has developed technology for one person to take over or help another avatar to that they can win the game. In other words, they play dirty. After going through the copper gate, one of the higher ups of IOI, Nolan Sorrento, tries to recruit Parvizal by using a death threat, but the protagonist escapes from getting blown up. Soon, he’s on the run, but he’s managed to amass money by agreeing to endorsement deals after getting the copper key.
Along the way, Parzival has the help of his friend Aech, another egg hunter (gunter), and gets to know Art3mis, a famous blogger, as well as Daito and Shoto. They become the first players to unlock the copper gate. Although they are reluctant to work together at first, they soon realise that they have to co-operate to bring the evil corporation down.
It’s clear that Cline is a veritable ’80s pop culture geek as the book is filled with references to old games, consoles, movies, bands, everything. The puzzles were also cleverly crafted, which left readers guessing. Although there were a few times that the references were a little overwhelming, the book had a fun, suspenseful quality to it — I was dying to know what happened next, and I’ve never been so excited to flip through the pages and find out more.
But what made this book good was its compelling characters, especially the Wade Watts himself, who grapples with his own video game addiction, fully aware that he is using it to escape from the pain of existing in the real world. Throughout the book, he spends so much time in the video game world that he forgets to live, and it’s only after meeting the avatar of Halliday himself and the prospect of meeting Art3mis in real life that compels him to step away from his VR station.
Likewise, two of the other characters in this book also show the benefits of practically living in a virtual world; Art3mis is “Rubenesque” in the book, and looks almost like her real avatar — with blinged out armour and enhanced features, of course. And in real life, Art3mis, or Samantha, has a port wine stain birthmark on her face that she hides with her fringe. This is revealed towards the end, of course, and it’s a glimpse at the standards of beauty that women are subjected to, even in the virtual world. The fact that this character chose to hide her birthmark says a lot about how one can enhance one’s appearance to look more like a patriarchal ideal, and yet, strangely empower women as they are no longer self-conscious in the virtual universe.
The bigger surprise though, was Aech. Aech takes on the form of a straight, white male avatar, but she’s actually this cool African American lady who’s pretty smart and intelligent. Oh and she’s a lesbian. She learned this trick from her mother who saw that more opportunties were given to her after she dressed up as a white male guy. However, this was left to the end, and a lot more could have been done with this, had the plot focused on Aech instead.
Ready Player One fast-paced, exciting, and well-written–perfect for anyone who has ever enjoyed a video game.
9/10