RE: READY PLAYER TWO by: Ernest Cline
A Book that I Just Finished
From: Travis
February 8, 2021
Let's get it out of the way now - Ready Player Two is not good. It is also not the kind of book that anyone is clamoring to read a bunch of random internet guys' opinions about, so I'm not making this post in order to spend a couple hundred words just shitting on Ernest Cline or his quote writing skill unquote or pointing out all of the many, many very real issues and inconsistencies found therein.
For one thing, others have already done a way better job of that than I could ever hope to (see http://372pages.com/ for more details).
What I want to spend time on here, is the weird way this book (well, books now, I guess) works better in almost every way in any other iteration than the written page, and I will present my argument on three (3) fronts: the spoken word, the motion picture, and other random video games. I may even actually talk about this book before it's all over.
[Preamble:]
Reading through these books is like walking on hot coals -- if you do it quickly, without slowing for even a second to think about it, you can probably do it. You might even tell the people at work about it the following Monday, like, "here's a quirky thing I did". But if you stop for even just a second to ask yourself any questions -- who runs this coal walking operation? How hot do they make these coals anyway? How many insurance claims do they file each month? -- you will get burned, and badly. Unless you have some unnatural talent for speed reading, getting through these books by using your human eyes to interpret the ink that has been imprinted on the unjustly-used carcasses of the once-noble trees held in your hands, you cannot but start to ask questions. You re-read, fearing that some mental slip made you incorrectly think the stupidest thing you've ever read had just entered your mind, unbidden. But, no, you didn't misread.
That's what he wrote.
On purpose.
And someone claims to have edited it.
And they published it like that.
On purpose.
And now, your feet now have third-degree burns.
[The Spoken Word:]
I think I said as much on the podcast (and maybe that one hasn't come out yet at this point in time?) but I 'read' Ready Player One as an audiobook back when the movie was announced. I listened to it at my office desk while most of my focus was engaged in whatever TPS report I was putting together that week.
Wil Wheaton reads all of Mr Cline's books, it seems, and I think he does a fine job of it. Mr Wheaton has the right ear for this kind of nerdy, fan boy wish fulfillment narrative. He knows the target audience -- he's probably talked to thousands of them while signing headshots or Wesley Crusher action figures (mint in package) at hundreds of cons -- and he reads in a way that helps speed your mental feet across the hot coals of this prose. When someone is reading it to you and you aren't really able to track with it 100% due to work emails and conference calls, the endless backstory dumps don't seem as endless; who can tell how many pages we've been rambling on?
The constant retreading of plot points are helpful; you probably didn't catch it the first time anyway.
The break-neck plot twists aren't as jarring; maybe you had to stop the tape for your coffee break and time feels like it has passed when you hit play again?
[The Motion Picture:]
When the movie version of RP1 came out, I put the kids to bed and took myself to a late night showing. Me and maybe 15 other people that either don't sleep much or didn't have work the next day all watched as Steven Spielberg did his best to wall paper over the source material... and I remember being ambivalent about it. But the more I thought it over, the more I realized: this movie still wasn't that good, but it was so, so much better.
Exhibit A: the random pop culture references that the book is just fucking lousy with are so much easier to take as visual blips on screen. In the book, we'd have something like "you remember Back to the Future? And Buckaroo Bonzai? and the Ghostbusters? ...And they all had cars? Yeah, my car was all three of those, but in one car". In the movie, we just see the damn DeLorean and.. I mean... that doesn't excuse anyone for just throwing someone else's IP up on screen, but we are at least spared a character directly telling us how cool we should find the whole thing. It is a literal example of show don't tell -- Show me some Battletoads if you must, but please don't tell me about the internet meme of calling Gamestop to see if they have Battletoads, okay?
Exhibit B: Every single challenge was different (I think, I refuse to go back and double check). In the book, the challenges that Wade had to pass in order to inherit the BIGGEST CORPORATION IN THE POST APOCALYPTIC WORLD seemed to all boil down to: do you happen to know about some random trivia about a game? And can you recite all the lines of Wargames? Great, you're in.
Nothing about getting the keys had anything to do with proving your moral character, revealing anything about how you might run the most important piece of software known to man, whether you could handle the financial impact of becoming wealthier than god in an instant... but if you remembered that origami unicorn from Blade Runner, you're probably fine.
Now, again, the movie didn't completely fix this problem, but it at least showed that the damn characters could think, you know? You can make arguments that in an online race that has been run by hundreds of people every day for years on end, someone would've found the 'secret' of going in reverse long ago -- hell, my son figured out how to do that in Mario Kart on day one -- but at least it required a modicum of thought, other than just happening to know something. Using another movie (the Shining) as a frame of reference to hide the true challenge (getting up the nerve to ask a girl to dance) was at least getting them to consider personal and social shortcomings, flimsy as it might've been. In the movie, Wade had to pass a final test to prove he wasn't going to just cash out ... and maybe that was the same in the book too (again, I refuse to re-read).
Exhibit C: Since the narrative moved out of the first person / memoir style, we didn't have to hear any of Wade's inane ruminating or random atheistic screeds, his constant noticing of himself experiencing things, nor his general drooling over ART3MIS / Samantha.
Exhibit D: No depictions nor mention of discrete flaps for bodily eliminations.
[Other Random Video Games:]
So, I'm old as time, and don't know how hip and/or current RoBlox itself is -- mostly, from what I've seen it's a jumble of poorly coded crap that kids 10 and under can dip into without much barrier to entry.
What I would constantly see when my kids played, though: games that were based around fan recreations of other pop culture movies, games, and books. Here was one game that let you play through the Captain Underpants movie; platforming over Turbo Toilets gone haywire, answering trivia questions about the books. Here was another where someone had ripped off Among Us or FortNite. One game had you running away from the Pennywise the Clown (why Mr Wise shows up in what is ostensively a kids game is a topic for another time). Another had a recreation of a high school and the whole point of the game was to walk to your classes (what excitement!). If this wasn't a real-life example of the Oasis, just with way worse graphics, I guess I can't think of a better one.
This past Christmas, my oldest son got deeply into an event that happened in RoBlox. I don't know if there was any connection between that event and the release of Ready Player Two, but as he told me about his digital conquests, I began to see parallels.
From what I was able to gather, this event required that the end users go between the most popular games on the platform and collect - you guessed it -- keys by completing challenges. But, here's the thing, the challenges were actual challenges. You had to be good at these games to complete the challenges; not to mention the amount of research that went in to figuring out which games had them. There was even a point where you had to put in codes in the game's console in order to combine your inventory items to create other objects so you could progress. At the end there was a type of a battle arena where you could compete against NPC versions of some YouTube people I didn't recognize in order to win the grand prize.
My son didn't inherit the RoBlox empire, but he did stay busy and engaged throughout the winter break. He was constantly "world-hopping", consulting online knowledge bases, recruiting team mates to accomplish the harder tasks, (unless I completely misunderstood him) even spending in-game currency to block out host servers to make the tasks a little easier to complete. He did more "Gunting" in those couple weeks than Wade did in the whole book.
[Anyway:]
Seeing as this post is tagged to Ready Player Two, I suppose I should at least touch on the book before closing out.
Once again, I went the audiobook route... but I guess either this story wasn't as unexpected? Or maybe since I'd seen it done better elsewhere (see above)? But I really didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the first.
Here you will still find Mr Cline going on and on about specifications of the security system of his house -- proving, I guess how much he's world-built and planned things so that the internet nerds don't call him out on the most unimportant of details -- instead of making an overarching story with any kind of a point. Again, all the challenges and alleged puzzles seem like things that the author already knew and back-filled a plot progression onto.
I think I also said this in a podcast, but as the book came to a close, I fell asleep (as I am wont to do these days) and missed the ending. "Well... I suppose everything turned out ok," I thought to myself and was ready to remove the download from my phone. But with this post in mind, I decided I should go back and finish it again, but conscious this time. I won't spoil anything specific, but if you're like me, and were maybe a little annoyed that knowing random trivia about Zork could win someone enough money to cancel the national debt; the reward that they earn in this book for knowing that Robert Downey Jr was once going to be in Pretty in Pink (and knowing basically nothing about Prince) is ten times more ridiculous, and feels akin to slapping the end of 2001 onto the Super Mario Brothers movie.
[Wrap up:]
I guess what I take away from all of this: Ready Players 1 and 2 probably do have a kernel of something really interesting in them; otherwise how else could they have both been best selling books for however many months in a row? How else could you get Steven Spielberg attached to a movie adaptation? Really, who wouldn't love to have another reality a mere mouse-click away - one that they could shape however they wanted, whenever they wanted?
But, to me at least, this is a rare case where the less time you spend on the underlying material the better off you are.
So, instead of recommending you read any of this, let me recommend you take the idea and the equivalent amount of time you would've spent reading or listening and use it to dream up your own Oasis. What would your three challenges be? What super user powers would you want? Which would you feel a bit creepy for using? Which random line from Short Circuit 2 would you hide a trillion dollars behind? I would probably go with the lyrics to the Los Locos gang's theme song ... but that's just me.