f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] Ready Player One [Author] Ernest Cline [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2011 [Read] 2015/05/02 [Review] 
YA SF fiction; most similar in feel to Snow Crash and Otherland but a much faster read and overall simpler plot. Much of the appeal is simply all the ‘80s references to geeky movies and video/computer games (hard not to feel a rush of nostalgia at a mention of Robotron or a narration of a game of Tempest, which makes me wonder how much people younger than me would enjoy it), so I would strongly suggest watching at the very least War Games and since the game billionaire character seems to be based on John Carmack, Masters of Doom. (I wondered reading it how deep the resemblances go: the protagonist starts off much like Carmack did.) I was not too keen to read this, because there seems to be a deep failure of creativity when it comes to VR: almost every work seems to pick one of two hackneyed plots - ’the characters are trapped in the game world!’ or ‘the characters are competing in a contest!’ (See: every American kid cartoon, every anime like .hack/Sword Art Online, etc.) RP1 takes the latter tack, but it at least executes well. It’s fundamentally a silly idea to imagine that people would voluntarily stuff the entire Internet into World of Warcraft (way too slow and inconvenient) or that his early plot device of travel fees would ever exist (imagine paying each time you loaded a new HTML page while browsing or having to pay to switch games on your computer; absurd!) but the world at least feels reasonably realistic, with blogs and forums and professional gaming leagues and streaming video channels, and I can hardly blame him for the global-warming/energy-crisis dystopia he picks. (Many near-future SF fiction fail to achieve even a contemporary feel; many authors aim for 10 years in the future, but with the lack of smartphones and video and apps, wind up achieving a feel 10 years in the past.) Eventually you get used to it and even a narrated game of Pac-man becomes gripping. (But a decent amount of the plot takes place offline, so it’s not all ’80s namedropping and narrating games.)
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