Digital Dependency: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Digital Dependency

Ready Player One
by Ernest Cline

Doctors ask you how many consecutive hours you look at a screen for a reason. Sure, it's bad for your eyes, but spending too much time online can also lead to depression, isolation, obesity, social ineptitude, and anything/everything else that your PCP warned you against even when when you said you only look at your phone for maybe an hour a day.

You filthy, filthy liar. Doctors can smell the dishonesty.

Even if it's not your phone (maybe you're like me, and you don't even have one), then it's the computer, a tablet, or the TV. Pretty much everyone, regardless of age or generation, is at least a little bit guilty of this new "digital dependency" pandemic. Maybe this is just what we are becoming as a society, but what does our future look like if we take this all a little too far?

Ready Player One explores exactly that. In Ready Player One, the whole of the world's population lives inside of a video game simulation called the OASIS: a place where you can present yourself as whatever you'd like to be and forget about the real, dismal world that you live in. Sounds great, right?

If the public's obsession with the OASIS hadn't been strong enough to begin with, the creator, James Halliday, found a way to rouse everyone's interests in one video he made shortly before his death; in it, with several cameos of popular shows and video games from the '80s, Halliday lays down the rules of a contest which would decide who would inherit the rights to the OASIS as well as Halliday's entire multi-billion dollar fortune. The goal? Be the first to find the "Easter egg" hidden inside of nearly-limitless OASIS world by collecting three different keys and passing through three different gates.

For those who aren't savvy with video game terminology, an "Easter egg" (or just an egg as it is referred to in the novel) is a secret that is programmed into a game's coding that is often irrelevant to the game itself, meant to serve as a little "bonus" for those that find it. For example, in the real-life Adventure for the Atari, the name of one of the non-credited programmers flashed upon the screen upon carrying a "gray dot" into a secret room in the game.

Wade Watts, the main protagonist, is a self-proclaimed gunter: someone who has dedicated their entire life to the search for the egg. It took five years since the start of the contest, but Wade becomes the first person to obtain the Copper Key, the first in the series of three mentioned in Halliday's video. He becomes an instant celebrity overnight, but not everyone is wishing him congratulations on his discovery; some are going great lengths to get information about the key's location from him.

To be frank, I really enjoyed this book. Like, a lot. I'm not a huge sit-down-with-a-book-and-read type, but I found myself wanting to get to the end of this book more than anything else. I can be extremely critical of character development (or lack thereof), romantic subplots, and dystopian themed books in general, but these are all things that Ready Player One does extremely well. Many books based off of video games are usually incredibly plain-- the whole "let's have an adventure and go save the princess!" type plots-- and/or are written by people who are gamers, not writers. Ernest Cline is both of those things, clearly; he knew what he was doing when he wrote this. He is so well-versed in games and '80s pop culture that I actually did learn more than a thing or two that I felt guilty for not knowing, being the video game fan that I am.

However, I would not recommend this book to every person that I see. It is extremely well-written and an incredible debut novel, and while I wouldn't necessarily say you need prior video game or pop culture knowledge to read it, it would be easier to understand the novel's jokes and references if you do; in addition to that, Ready Player One can be extremely wordy in many places, to the point where some might say it's just a whole lot of filler. I disagree; I think that nearly all of what he includes is necessary to understand the story, but if you're the type of person who is more into a quick read than a detailed novel, then Ready Player One probably isn't the book for you.

Like all books, it does have its pros and it cons, but what really sets it apart from others in its genre is its ability to raise some really thoughtful questions: is our world becoming Wade's, and is it coming in less that 30 years, like this book predicts? Will we become even more dependent on the digital world than we already are-- eyes glued to cellphones, more friends online than in real life-- so much to the point where we don't even live in the physical world anymore?