Book Report: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

John Douglas suggested that being an 80s gamer dork I might enjoy reading Ready Player One.   A few pages into the book as a man named James Halliday is describing his discovery of the first easter egg in a video game called Adventure made for the Atari 2600,  I knew John was right.  This book was written for me.  Or not just me, I suppose, but for people like me.  Reading Halliday's experience transported me back to when my family got an Atari 2600 back in, I don't know, 1980?  or so?  Adventure was one of the first games we bought.  It was my favorite.  I remember having vivid dreams (graphics way better than the game's) in which I was the main character, travelling from castle to castle fighting dragons.  I remember finding the easter egg Halliday spoke about.  There was no game magazine, no website spoilers ... just me finding a dot on the ground in the game, then noticing that I could pick it up, and there was a corresponding dot on a wall somewhere and if I was holding the dot I found, I could walk through that wall to a secret room.  It was awesome.  I felt exactly the way Halliday described feeling.

And so it went throughout the entire book.  Total nostalgiafest.

In Ready Player One, Halliday had developed a new interface with the online environment.  Originally designed for immersive 3D game play, Oasis quickly became the preferred way to interact in all online experiences. Of course, this made Halliday insanely wealthy.  He had no heirs when he died, so he designed a game to find a series of easter eggs in Oasis.  The first person to find all three would inherit Halliday's wealth, including a controlling stake in Oasis itself.

So much money was at stake that the game developed its own subculture ... people who dedicated themselves to becoming professional egg hunters, or Gunters as they came to be called.  Ready Player One is about one Gunter named Parzival and his group of friends who are racing against Innovative Online Industries, a corporate internet service provider that has hired and trained an elite group of Gunters in the hopes of winning the controlling interest in Oasis and making some extremely profitable (for them) changes.

There were a few things that bugged me.  James Halliday seemed to have an awful lot of "favorite" movies, books, games, whatever.  Like anytime Mr. Cline needed to explain how his characters solved a puzzle it was just, "Oh Halliday's favorite ~something~ was X and that explains it".  I swear he had five different favorite movies.  Two of Parzivals friends are from Japan and seemed somewhat strongly stereo typed.  I mean, maybe that was some meta-theme ... 80s culture plays a strong role in the book and in the 80s Japanese men were often portrayed with a certain bushido code stereotype, so maybe Parzivals friends were portrayed that same way to play up the 80s culture link. It still bugged me.  Finally, at one point Parzival suffered a very violent loss and yet seemed to just shrug it off.  It seemed unrealistically cool/detached or something.

But overall, the flaws were pretty minor and the fun was oh so much fun.  The characters were cool.  I cheered for them when they succeeded and got angry for them at IOI's dastardly deeds. The writing flows in a way that makes it a very quick read.  Thematically, the book has some depth.  It addresses issues of social interaction in a virtual world; extolling the importance of real world human contact, without devaluing the merits of virtual space.  Most of all, Ernest Cline's nostalgia-fu is strong.