Unready Player One - Spoilers

Of course in many ways this is a book I would have liked to have written: for the replete references to games, the popularity and wish-fulfillment. As it is, I could hardly justify skimming it, but I could hardly put it down, either. Beautiful trash. Buttery popcorn.

Is this a book about escaping into nostalgia and fantasy, or embracing their lessons to better live in and seek to understand the real world? Yes.

Ernest Cline wants to have his metaphysical cake and eat it, too, and the result is just not nourishing, while probably not actually corrupting. With so much of popular culture, which is like a media plague, you can't unsee it, and so it's not only the time wasted taking it in, the malaise is in what you feel ever after as you have those images, that impression of futility or macabreness or whatever stamped on you, perhaps molding you, depending on how impressionable you still are--and you become a carrier for it, sharing it, talking about it, or simply influenced by it in subtler ways. It spoils you, and then you spoil it... But I mainly meant spoilers in the usual sense when I put it in the title, so if you want to read the book or see the movie, be warned.

I don't think Ready Player One is as bad as all that. Rather, it seems ambivalent or downright confused about the message implicit in its story, not cynical about the importance or even the possibility of stories or of the meanings they carry.

Throughout the quest for the game creator's Easter egg (the deep yearning for resurrection trivialized, the search for hidden meaning tropified and conventionalized), the main character and his love interest represent two competing ideals. He wants to win the game to take the money, outfit a spaceship, and escape the dying planet earth; she wants to use the money to feed its starving masses and rebuild the crumbling infrastructures of society. But both, in their dedication to the quest and determination to win, have already sunk their sense of self into the creator's dying wish, perhaps with the best of intentions, to tyrannize by love. Not, like Lear, by demanding that they show love and gratitude to him, exactly, but by demanding that they love the same things he loved. Wade and Art3mis devote their time to pastimes and trivia and by extension to Halliday's biography and everything he ever said in an effort to solve the puzzle of his egg-hunt. It's the distortion of the concept of a living tradition of great works, replacing canon with trivia (the way the word canon is often used now in referring to pop-culture works, ie. Star Wars, etc).

Of course they win, interestingly enough thanks to a trinity (three keys in the final door), a resurrection (the extra life coin from the Pacman machine), and a deus ex machina (the aid from his former co-creator, who represents something of the balance the story seems to want to strive for, since he and his wife--successful human relationship!--created the virtual education modules which seem to work so well at raising kids with the ability to track allusions and make snappy repartee). But no real sacrifice has to be made to get there--other than their freedom, which they gave up long ago, and all the time they've sunk into the game, their childhood and much of youth. But we're never given the sense that this was even a choice, they seem to have had only the future at stake, and once it is secured, they live happily ever after as the new god within the machine and the benefactress of the beleaguered planet.

Even if Wade somehow can be imagined to manage to follow in the co-creator's footsteps, using his godlike powers with restraint and for the good of players both in and outside of the simulated universe, and Art3mis to use her funds to teach people to fish, then, on the last page of the acknowledgements, the author basically undercuts the entire message of the book, which was driven home by the final scene of the story. He writes of his sci-fi and pop-culture heroes: "These people have all entertained and enlightened me, and I hope that--like Halliday's hunt--this book will inspire others to seek out their creations." That just seems completely wrong. If all the book is is an extended advertisement for already famous, recent, derivative artists, if Cline like his Halliday is aiming to tyrannize by love, to make us love the things he does, then we had better speak up before the egg-hunt consumes us.