I mentioned Ready Player One a few years back as a bad film I had watched aboard a lengthy flight over the Atlantic Ocean. It was such a forgettable film, the experience of watching it had completely disappeared from my mind only to be revived in the final weeks of the year when I was wrapping up my reviews. Despite the name of Steven Spielberg being attached to it, despite the fact that some quality actors were involved in the product, despite being based on a book that was on countless best-seller lists (including the New York Times), Ready Player One was a film that didn’t really do anything for me and seemed to disappoint fans of the book as well. It made its money back at the box office, but its success did not come close to matching the zeitgeist of the source material.

But hold on a minute. How good is the source material? The book must have been amazing if the movie couldn’t match its notoriety and success, right?

You might be surprised to learn that, even though Ready Player One is not a good movie, I actually prefer it a great deal to the novel on which it is based, and I can point to specific reasons why. After listening to the podcast 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back, in which members of the RiffTrax team read books they think they’ll hate, and joining them in the masochistic ‘adventure’ of reading the book by Ernest Cline along with them, I have a lengthy laundry list of items that justify my opinion of the novel, which happens to be: it is a piece of garbage.

For this article, I didn’t want to review the movie, because it’s not interesting enough to warrant it. Instead, I’m going to do a book review to point out the flaws in the source material so that if you see the mostly-boring film interpretation, you’ll at least understand why it’s better. I think it makes for a more interesting dissection of the fiction. Be aware, I will be spoiling events in both movie and book and operating under the assumption you have interacted with at least one of them.

The Biases

Up front, I want to lay out all my various biases that would influence my opinion as it relates to Ready Player One (RPO). Aside from my snobbish standards of literature I’ve developed over the years—not that I don’t enjoy the easy, simple, or schlocky reading experience—I should be the ideal target audience for RPO. I like video games. I like a fair amount of music and movies from the 1980s. I know a disgusting amount of nerdy facts that I cannot delete from my brain.

The book and the film are both trying desperately to tap into those interests and qualities like a nostalgic party keg of memories and hobbies. Even in watching the film again recently, I was able to identify countless references. I saw some that my girlfriend didn’t recognize when she watched the film with me, and she recognized a few that I didn’t know. She is also someone who would be close to the ideal target audience. Yet, she read the novel along with me and came to a similar level of hatred for the book and an indifference toward the film. How could something with such worldwide popularity suck so much in our eyes?

The Source

The Plot

The novel Ready Player One came out in 2011 and has been translated into more than 20 languages. It centers around a teenager named Wade Watts who lives in a dystopian world in the year 2045, in which society has mostly collapsed (except it hasn’t), and all anyone does is play the hugely popular video game called the OASIS. After the death of the core developer who created it, James Halliday, an Easter egg hunt is started to find all the clues he left behind to locate his reward, which is basically the entirety of his fortune and control of the OASIS. Due to the fact that the OASIS is the most popular thing since water, that fortune is well past a few billion dollars. Wade has to compete with other egg hunters (called “gunters”), as well as an evil corporation called IOI, which is trying to secure its control of the video game and, presumably, the world. Among his rivals, he finds friendship and love. And, according to the synopsis in the book’s description, he’ll have to learn how to deal with the real world in the process. In a nutshell, a young fanboy of the dead developer has to use his ‘knowledge’ and intuition to find and decipher the clues that were left behind so he can achieve his dreams.

It’s not the worst plot to have. However, how it’s executed and how the plot unfurls are where the novel runs into trouble—so 90% of the experience. Before I get into the details, just know that I think this book is terribly written and amateurish. You don’t need to take my word for it, as I am not a published fiction author and my opinion is not any more important than yours. If you liked the book, you have every right to disagree. However, I can definitely point out significant issues with the fiction itself as well as the craft. If you’re interested, read on.

Characters Suck

Perhaps the most important component of your fiction, aside from a simple grasp of the language in which you’re writing, is having compelling characters. Your plot does not need to be complicated. It doesn’t need to have crazy twists. You can even have a story that doesn’t really have intense action or tension. These can be forgiven to a certain degree if your characters are good enough to carry the experience. All these elements I mentioned can be extremely important to the story you’re trying to tell. However, an important, basic rule is that your characters must be interesting in order for any of those other factors to be significant. If you don’t have a single interesting character, any plot twists, moments of tension, action sequences, dialogue, or descriptions do not matter.

RPO is simply devoid of characters who are worth anything more than the quarters they would use to play an arcade game. The various main characters with whom you have to spend all your time are just the worst kind of nerds, whose language and opinions would often be classified as ‘problematic’ by today’s social standards. I’m fine with making your characters foul-mouthed, arrogant asses, so long as they still have something about them that makes them interesting. The main character, Wade, and the two other most prominent characters Aech (pronounced “H”) and Art3mis (yes, this is how it appears in the book) are interchangeable with each other. When someone is talking, there is no real way to distinguish one from the other through their dialogue alone. They all speak the same way, use the same sort of juvenile terminology and insults, and they all share the same interests because they’re all the same. They all want the same reward. They all are fans of Halliday and everything he ever liked. They all have a similar amount of useless and trivial knowledge about pop culture, video games, etc. The only ways in which the characters diverge are in specific moments in which one likes something over another, or in their gender.

The author, Ernest Cline, attempts to play off the gender of his characters in ways that he probably thought were unique and interesting. Unfortunately, it comes across as clumsy and occasionally misogynistic. For one thing, this story is about gaming nerds who do not interact with real people on a regular basis. Aside from climbing down the stacks of trailers—in the one place anyone can point to in the book as being an interesting concept for a dystopian future’s detail—Wade doesn’t go outside. He, like the rest of the world, doesn’t need to go outside to do anything because he can just play the OASIS. Apparently, school takes place in the OASIS, as do elections, and seemingly everything else infrastructure-wise. So no one really interacts with anyone else in person much, which means that anonymity is a common sort of thing. Anyone who has ever played an online video game with multiplayer functionality knows that people rarely ever look like whatever avatar they’ve selected for the game. This is why it poses as somewhat of a challenge to have a romantic story between characters who do not know what the other looks like.

The author attempts to have his cake and eat it too in this regard. He wants his protagonist Wade to fall in love without coming across as too naive—even though there are countless areas in the book in which Wade acts like a complete moron. Cline does so by having Wade consider the fact that Art3mis, the girl for whom he pines constantly, may actually be a hairy-knuckled, overweight man named Chuck. He mentions the Chuck concept multiple times, yet he falls in love with her over the course of the book for simply being a possible girl who is into the same things he is. The dialogue never insinuates that their relationship will be an interesting or stable one. It’s simply that they have to fall in love, so they do. And in an attempt to make Wade seem like a ‘nice guy,’ Cline has him admit that he wouldn’t care if Art3mis didn’t look anything like her avatar in the OASIS; he would love her just the same. Does that mean that if she was, in fact, Chuck, he would still be into her/him? Would he be willing to take the leap and go down a path of a different sexual orientation because they connected on such a level? I suspect not, because Wade constantly contradicts this by focusing on his pathetic obsession with her potential looks, further demonstrating to the reader that he is only a ‘nice guy’ in the fedora-wearing, online sense of the term—one of several irritating contradictions within this book, which we’ll discuss more later.

When he isn’t busy touching himself to screenshots of Art3mis’ avatar, Wade does his best to find other ways for you to dislike him. He constantly puffs out his chest over his immense knowledge of pop-culture references and useless information about video games, movies, comics, TV shows, etc. Often, this involves pages of description about what occurs in a movie or how a video game is played, while pointing out how good he is at playing the game or remembering lines from the film. As I told my girlfriend while we read through this garbage, an alternative title for RPO could have been Weird Flex, But Okay! because of how habitual it is for Wade to mention some piece of media (that is way better than this book), then talk about how good he was at beating it if it’s a game, or how many times he’s watched it if it’s a show or movie. If you have ever met these types of people in real life, have you ever felt compelled to listen to what they have to say for longer than a minute before looking for an escape route? It’s no different than listening to a child explain their Pokémon card collection to you.

He’s a Teller Not a Shower

If there is any way to sum up the writing style of Cline and Ready Player One, it’s that there is a serious problem with show vs tell. After a few chapters, the writing style and the method of describing things become easy to predict. A majority of the time, when Wade is describing something that he’s seeing or interacting with within the world, the description is restricted to saying that it’s a thing from another piece of media that already exists. He might go through the trouble of telling you details like the year it was released, or who was involved in its creation, but he rarely ever physically describes something. If you don’t know what that thing is that he’s describing, or the media it’s referencing, you’ll get little from Wade with any details to assist in better visualizing it for yourself.

When he actually does bother to go into physical description about something without referencing Star Wars, it’s usually a stale, lengthy description of a video game that was so pixelated and old, you couldn’t physically describe it. He’ll go into the mechanics of how a game was played, the rules, its history of development, and other miscellaneous facts that do nothing to make you better visualize it or feel any more connected with the world. The best examples of this are when he goes on for several pages describing games like Joust, ZORK, and Black Tiger. ZORK doesn’t even have visual graphics; it’s just a text-based game, yet he still finds things to blather about, as though it’s interesting and useful to the fiction. Joust is an old game with limited pixel count to the point that you could barely make out the characters on the screen as people riding ostriches with lances—and that’s only if you squint real hard, use your imagination, and possibly get drunk. At least Black Tiger has enough pixels to physically describe the graphics in a way that would make sense, but, ironically enough, he doesn’t bother to do so with that particular game. Instead, he makes the game ‘real’ and just summarizes the experience.

It is astonishing to me that so many people found this book entertaining when it reads like an adolescent attempt at a series of Wikipedia pages. Cline decided to set his world in the not-too-distant future, after society had collapsed and lawless badlands formed outside the walls of major cities. Yet, he chose to focus on things like the way to play Pac-Man, or a room from Family Ties. Despite coming up with the concept of this massive video game that has practically everything in it, he does very little to describe the actual mechanics of the game, how the game is monetized, or any legitimate justification as to why the OASIS is so popular or anything other than a Second Life mod. Other authors might think it would be worthwhile to describe this post-apocalyptic world, its inhabitants living in towers of RVs and trailers stacked on top of each other, and how this new society works in tandem with this addicting video game that he invented. Cline opts to describe existing ‘80s arcade games, the inside of a Rush vinyl album cover, or a setting in Blade Runner without using much detail because surely you’ve seen Blade Runner!

All of these complaints are just in regards to his descriptions, or lack thereof. When he’s not wasting our time repeating lines of dialogue from the movie War Games, or flexing his intellectual muscles by referencing the lesser-known John Woo movies, he’s finding other ways to disrespect and talk down to his audience. This often comes in the form of one of the most annoying writing habits Cline has, which I have noticed in other books since I’ve read RPO: needless summaries and repetition of information.

The whole plot is built on the idea that these egg-hunting heroes can interpret the clues Halliday left behind so they can get the next key to unlock the next gate and finally reach the reward. This is mostly done through crude and simple four-line rhyming poems, which Cline/Wade is quick to point out is a quatrain. During the middle section of the book, a particular quatrain is repeated more than half a dozen times across the course of several chapters, with some of the four lines separated and repeated individually in the paragraph to really focus on them. If you want to make your readers engaged with your cryptic poem, I do not suggest having the narrator stare at the poem, pull the individual lines out, and repeat the lines both individually and collectively in the quatrain, over and over again. At the very least, don’t do that on the same page multiple times. Also, if you want your poem to truly be cryptic, I would recommend something more complex than a quatrain, in which you have a lot more room to play with the meanings and add red herrings. However, that would be too difficult to do and would also operate under the assumption that you respect your readers enough that you would provide them with enough context to the clues so they could figure it out with the character.

His repetition of poems isn’t where Cline’s condescending view of his readers’ intelligence ends either. He also summarizes entire sections of text, as though we are not capable of understanding dialogue or characterization. For example, when Shoto meets up with Wade after the death of Daito, he explains that despite calling each other “brothers” they were not related by blood. A few paragraphs later, he then explains the origin of their friendship and further reiterates what he already said at the top of the exchange:

“My relationship with Daito is difficult to explain.” He stopped to clear his throat. “We were not brothers. Not in real life. Just in the OASIS. Do you understand? We only knew each other online. I never actually met him…

Then a few paragraphs later it says:

Shoto and Daito had grown so close that they were now like brothers, so when they created their new gunter identities, they decided that in the OASIS they were brothers, from that moment on.

First of all, the concept of ‘brothers through bond alone’ is not that difficult to grasp. It’s in a ton of the very media that is referenced in this book. Second of all, the narration goes through the trouble of telling us the origin story of these two characters in a very quick synopsis then still decides to hammer home the ‘brother’ concept to make it as literal as it can, as though we didn’t understand that already.

Other weird repetitious habits include moments where the narration describes a thing and how it looks like something, then says it looks like that something. For example:

Directly ahead, a steep cobblestone staircase at the edge of the runway led up to a grand, floodlit mansion constructed on a plateau near the base of the mountain range. Several waterfalls were visible in the distance, spilling off the peaks beyond Morrow’s Mansion
“It looks like Rivendell,” Aech said, taking the words out of my mouth.
I nodded. “It looks exactly like Rivendell from the Lord of the Rings movies,” I said still staring up at it in awe.

Clearly, Aech’s statement did not take the words out of his mouth. Here is another example:

…and it took me a moment to place the towering female robot Art3mis was piloting. It was black and chrome in color, with elaborate boomerang-shaped headgear and symmetrical red breastplates that made it look like the female version of Tranzor Z. Then I realized it was the female version of Tranzor Z, an obscure character from the original Mazinger Z anime series known as Minerva X.

He doesn’t bother to let you read his dialogue or descriptions and come up with your own interpretations; he has to spell it out for you. He doesn’t provide details within his story using foreshadowing or description that would make you capable of solving the riddles along with Wade. He just explains it all after the fact. He doesn’t know how to properly describe his world or how it works, so he relies on referring to other pre-existing material and just expects you to know it. Does this sound like a fun read to you?

Bow Down Before the One You Serve

I could go on and on for days about my various gripes with this book, but I’ll bring it to a head here with this last issue I noticed, which really annoyed me. Before I do, however, I want to mention that I’m not a religious individual. You’ll understand why I bring this up in a second.

In the first chapter of the book Wade launches into a multi-page, soap-box screed about religion and his distaste for it for seemingly no apparent reason. He goes on at length in the most patronizing and arrogant manner of how dumb religion is and how he “didn’t have the heart to tell” his neighbor that there was no God. It truly matches the maturity of the character of Wade Watts. Now, if I were to give the benefit of the doubt, I could assume that this is the author demonstrating the immaturity of a teenager who thinks he knows everything. People of all ages are certainly capable of being stupid, immature asses when it comes to topics of which they seem to know so much about, but a teenager is an easy target when trying to use maturity as a plot point.

Regardless, if the writing style had convinced me that the author had the skills necessary to separate his own views and opinions from the characters and his story, or at the very least demonstrate his own sense of humility and irony through the use of the plot and characterization, I would think he did a good job of showing how immature his main character is. However, to truly demonstrate that’s what he was going for with the main character within his own book, it would mean that Wade would have to grow and reflect on his actions and opinions, and come to realize how foolish he had been, or be punished for it. By the end of the book, Wade has learned next to nothing about being a kind, generous, and humble human being. If he has, it isn’t demonstrated through any particular action.

Normally, the final act is where all the major events start forcing the character to grow and become more than what they were in the beginning. While some catastrophic events take place in RPO, these do nothing to instill any real lessons in Wade. Instead, he manages to succeed in the most perilous of circumstances through skills and knowledge that we didn’t know he had. All of the tension in these moments is swiftly sucked out, coming across as little more than minor inconveniences. The only real thing that happens to shake up his world is that Art3mis rejects him in the middle of the book, but that doesn’t cause him to behave any better by the end. In fact, he only comes across as more disgusting and obsessed with her than he was at the beginning of the book.

Why am I mentioning this and how does this relate to the Atheist rant in the beginning? At no point is it clear that Wade has learned any lessons to indicate that he’s grown and become more mature. At no point does he acknowledge his immaturity in dictating the truth of the universe as he sees it. What does occur—over and over again in the text—is a frequent unintentional reference to religion. He describes the Almanac left behind by Halliday as his “bible.” He alludes to Halliday as a savior and reveres him constantly like a deity. He recites sections from his “bible” with Biblical notation. One of which is a section in which Halliday justifies and encourages masturbation as a necessity. Don’t believe me? Here’s a direct quote:

AA 241:87 — I would argue that masturbation is the human animal’s most important adaptation. The very cornerstone of our technological civilization. Our hands evolved to grip tools, all right—including our own. You see, thinkers, inventors, and scientists are usually geeks, and geeks have a harder time getting laid than anyone…

And it goes on quite a bit from there.

The number of times a religious reference is made unironically, is infuriatingly high. Again, if I had more faith in Ernest Cline’s writing abilities, I would think he was making satire with how absurd this is. However, when you look at the simple prose, the delusional attempts at assigning a philosophical message, and the inability to render characters as anything other than clichés and projections of the author, it’s very easy to see Ready Player One for what it is. It’s pure, unadulterated, wish fulfillment.

If someone can show me the point in the book at which I misinterpreted the text and mistakenly believed Wade Watts and James Halliday to be anything other than projections and megaphones for the author, I would be grateful. If you can provide proof that this book is in fact a spoof or satirical piece of art—and not just claim that it is, like Tommy Wiseau does to defend The Room—I would feel better about being wrong about everything. Truly, I would be happy to believe that this was all a joke and that I got played, instead of the harsh reality that this dumb book has been translated into more than 20 languages, is a world-wide best seller, still has a rating average higher than 4 stars on most online book stores, and has been made into a major motion picture by Steven Spielberg.

The Movie

I won’t spend much time here, but I just want to point out the spots in which the movie changes or even improves upon what happens in the book. Again, I do not think Ready Player One from 2019 is a good film. The only defense I have for it is that the book is worse.

First of all, the fall of mankind has not happened in the way the book described. It’s still a dystopian, corporate future, but there’s no allusion to badlands or societal collapse. This is a good change because of the fact that we’re not left wondering how society still functions. The change from the world in which we are already living isn’t as drastic. With the world coming across as still familiar to us, the audience is not likely to get as hung up on things in the world that don’t make sense or don’t matter as much.

In addition, more time is spent in the real world and significant changes are made to the Art3mis character. The whole anonymity situation and development of her relationship with Wade in the book was a clunky mess that lasted up to the final pages. Art3mis seemed like just a feistier version of the protagonist and didn’t really have a personality to set herself apart from the rest of the group. The movie gives a bit more backstory to her character, places more focus on the influence of the evil corporation IOI in the real world, and gives her some motivation. It’s still not really fleshed out in a way that really makes the most amount of sense, but it at least creates a bit of a rebel vs evil empire situation that allows for Wade and her to bond outside of the video game and create a more believable relationship. Insinuating she might be Chuck up until the end of the film wouldn’t be necessary when you already had another character who demonstrates how anonymity on the internet can tweak the way people identify themselves.

Another big change to the film is how the heroes solve the riddles of the egg hunt. The riddles themselves are very simple and stupid, BUT they make sense to a much wider audience than what the book attempted. In the book, the riddles were really only designed for someone with Ernest Cline’s specific knowledge of the things that he liked. An average person, or even a nerd who is into video games that came out after 1990 was not going to know that the “dwelling long neglected” referenced in the second quatrain was meant to make you think of ZORK. Never mind that it wouldn’t really be exciting to watch someone play Joust and recite every line from War Games. The way the book was written, it was clear that Cline didn’t expect you to know anything about the riddles either, because he described what these games were as though you had never heard of them before. The movie ditches these moments and instead tries to make the sequences more general and self-explanatory. It’s quite absurd to believe that, in the years since Halliday’s death, no one bothered going in reverse at least once in the race that acted as the first challenge in the hunt, but it’s better than the boring challenges of the book.

There are several other spots in which the film does a better job of laying out the rules of the world and telling the story than the book, but I won’t go into detail here. Though, there were a few changes I didn’t necessarily agree with. The way in which Wade gets the all-important quarter that is needed in the final moments of the film is pretty lame, because it’s just given to him for knowing some trivia. At least in the book he had to discover a secret and complete a challenge to get it. The importance of the characters Shoto and Daito are also significantly reduced, not that they were that interesting in the novel. It might be for the best, though, since they were mostly hyperbolic Japanese stereotypes whose dialogue was sometimes mistranslated because Cline didn’t bother to do his research. However, I will note that Shoto was changed to Sho so the young kid playing that avatar could be Chinese, instead of Japanese—you know exactly why they did this.

Closing Thoughts

My girlfriend asked me if there was anything positive I could take away from reading this book besides the ironic enjoyment of reading something terrible and listening to a funny podcast about it. I struggled to answer, but she had a good one for herself. She said it inspired her to write her own fiction because if Cline could write something and people enjoyed it, there was no reason she couldn’t do the same. And that’s just it: It’s a preference.

I can point out a lot of things that I disliked about the book. A lot. I can point out my negative interpretations of the text, which may very well be wrong. I can rant and rave about the writing style’s flaws as I see them. That doesn’t mean I only enjoy high-brow fiction, because I read my share of trashy novels as well. I read Warhammer 40,000 fiction and other stories that wouldn’t be regarded as anything other than schlock. Like what you like. I know I was rather harsh in my criticisms, but if you enjoyed the book or the movie, you are entitled to your opinion as much as I am to mine. If you had fun reading it, read it again and enjoy it, you don’t have to listen to me.

If anything, I hope that Ready Player One inspires you to write your own material and to write something better. If there is one positive thing I could say I took from this book, it is that if I ever finish my own fiction projects, I know that I need to get whomever the hell promoted this book to make it a success in the first place. This is proof you don’t need to be the next Hemingway, Dickens, or Joyce to be a successful fiction author. You just need a good agent.

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