This was originally posted on blogger.

Ready Player One deals with a frightening and unfortunately familiar dystopia. In the year 2045, the world has gone through crisis after crisis of wars, poverty, and climate catostrophe. Meanwhile, virtual reality has reached a whole new level. Nearly everyone on the planet is plugged into the OASIS, a near-perfect simulation that has millions of planets, public schools, and institutions acting through completely anonymous avatars. Created by James Halliday, an unabashed 80s geek, the OASIS has come to dominate most people’s reality. One day, Halliday dies, and leaves his entire fortune to the person who can solve his secret “easter egg” hidden in the game.

I’ll be honest: I read this book in only two days. The sci-fi, fantastical world Ernest Cline builds is gripping, and so too is Wade Watts’ (the protagonist) hunt for Halliday’s egg. The obsession I had with the book probably mimics Cline’s old obsessions with games ranging from Dungeons and Dragons in his youth to World of Warcraft later in his life.

The book is geeky in a endearing but ignorant way. The influential characters of Ready Player One are mostly nerdy, white men from mid-west America that flex their 80s pop culture references on every damn page. And why shouldn’t they? Of course knowing the lines from Monty Python and the Holy Grail should determine the fate of half a trillion dollars. But really, that’s every nerd’s dream – for skills otherwise useless to society to make you a billionaire in a month. Think crypto, hedge funds, computer science.

Like it or not, this might be the world we’re headed towards. My one memorable experience in virtual reality (VR) was a rollercoaster demo in an airport in Seoul, complete with a vibrating chair that shook you back and forth. Why sit in line for hours at Disneyland when you can the next best thing right in your living room? I was shockingly captivated. Our mobile phones, laptops, TVs have become increasingly immersive and the “real” world increasingly repungant. Some folks in the tech spaceseem to have missed the anti-corporatist messages of the book, like dear Mark Zuckerberg who envisions his re-branded company building “a digital world built over our own, comprising virtual reality headsets and augmented reality”. 

Time and time again, we’re asked to consider in the book: is this just a video game? At times I think that the joys of virtual reality – however great – can’t be meaningful because, well, they’re not real. But as I went through the book I thought harder about that. Most of our institutions in America can be analogized to some kind of virtual reality. Our education system. The corporate ladder. Online shopping. These are spaces where arbitrary definitions of success – like acing the SAT – can yield massive material benefits to you personally. Now with COVID, these virtual realities have become even more commonplace. It’s a fantastic, bizarre thing that you can conduct your entire life through a monitor and keyboard (heck, if we’re doing that already, why not make it as enjoyable as OASIS?). In America, a “service-oriented” economy, one is actually discouraged from pursuing activities like gardening, construction, or carpentry (unless you’re some sort of hippie, or from Colorado). Everyone knows that real (a word I’ve come to question) opportunity lies in the virtual world*.

As I read the book, I was reminded of Sufism, or mystical Islam. The way the doctrine was explained to me is that everything about ourselves – what we see, do, how we act – is an illusion. Deep down within us is our inner selves in the “Absolute Reality”. Once we know our inner selves, the physical world becomes immaterial. True Sufis have a vastly different perspective on our place on this planet.

Now, I’m not sure about all that. I do know that for all its geekiness and sci-fi tropes, Ready Player One made me think a little harder about what is “real” and what’s worth living for. I recommend the read.

* Karl Marx himself described the difference between the “real bodily form” of money and its “abstract exchange value”. Money can be converted universally exactly because it is not tied down to a particular commodity. OASIS currency, as it happens in the book, becomes more stable than coins produced by a government.