Prelude
At this point in time, I've only just finished Ernest Cline's Ready Player One. A story depicting a VR-oriented world, where the creator of the virtual worlds sets his fortune as the prize of a global easter egg hunt.
I originally picked up the book well over a year ago, but stopped reading a bit less than halfway through. I personally don't like drawing such direct inspiration from things so closely related to what I do professionally. With the movie that's now out, I stayed away from trailers and reading news about it, wanting to take Ernest Cline's vision without visual bias. Here are my thoughts on the topic of the book's Style Over Substance dilemma.
Style Over Substance
Ready Player One's 80s era outlook on video games and entertainment is a look back at a key decade for entertainment, but juxtaposed into a dystopian, VR-encompassing future. Whilst Ernest Cline bounces between the vision of the OASIS, the book's VR metaverse, and the 80s themed contents of this virtual world, perhaps the substance of the text as a book suffers from a reader's perspective. In this analysis, we look at the merits of the story as a book, from its vision of the world down to the development of characters. There may be some spoilers.
Ready Player One takes place in the near-future of our own timeline, where the pool of all entertainment history has taken place. The book doesn't shy from reminding the reader about all the hit, pop culture TV shows, movies and games of the past, being the basis for much of the OASIS' content. But arguably, the most interesting part is actually the start of the book. Where the bubble of 80s content is primarily contained in the OASIS's creator, James Halliday's final challenge. The main character, Parvizal instead goes on to talk about the history of entertainment since the OASIS, its role in education, the real world, and how it has completely changed how humans interact in general. Everybody has their own vice in this world, and you'll find it in VR. This I believe is what actually hooks readers in, it's an imaginative description of content that doesn't exist, but we can envision.
The book goes into a downward spiral of pop culture references, as Parvizal's story really begins. Short-cutting much-needed exposition to the new settings by making simile with the eras they are based off of. This can easily alienate anybody who isn't familiar with the appearance of a particular movie set, but is obviously catering to a nice audience. Although, it does often feel like the reader is treated like a non-intelligent being.
Flat out saying, "It was the x from y. Mister Person was a huge fan of the show, so much so that this place is exactly like that."
New settings would be much more interesting if there was some suspense and guesswork about new locations. Even if it took some time of describing a location before Parvizal revealed where it was from. This issue perpetrates throughout the whole book, and in my opinion makes the book much worse than it needed to be.
Taking this in stride, the OASIS as a concept, and all of its contents would be fascinating to experience, which is why I believe people can enjoy the concept so much. But what I don't hear people talk about much, is the actual characters of the book. This pertains to the style over substance debate, whereby the world is far more interesting than its characters. As a book-reader, I observe the characters as I would any other novel.
Parvizal is the product of this world, his character is 'vanilla', and a template in which to imprint your own, self-proclaimed affinity with entertainment. Yet, this isn't even the character's biggest flaw. A lack of development against other characters, and a deus ex machina style approach to all challenges makes you infinitely bored at the complications of the story. In every situation, his internet level knowledge of entertainment gets him through anything that tests his knowledge or gaming skills, he literally pulls out magical items out of nowhere to deal with obstacles. The book glazes over these very quickly, and made my speed-read new obstacles he came across because I knew how it was going to get resolved. Yep. There it goes. Parvizal happened to have watched that movie a superjillion times in his early days. Literally 'luckily'.
The other characters in Ready Player One have the unfortunate of being perceived through Parvizal's perspective. The book is written in first-person, which means that we have to read through his outlook on what could've been much more interesting characters. A core dynamic point of the relationship between characters are the expectations of meeting in real life. Here we see some interesting challenges that side characters have overcome thanks to the anonymity of VR. Yet despite the strength they've built over this struggle, these characters bear an insecurity about their real life selves that isn't shared with the main character. Parvizal at no point shows any real qualms about meeting people in real life. Parvizal somehow finds a way to enforce a weird sense of pity towards side characters that have shown they stand on equal or superior grounds in the OASIS. A clear example is Art3mis, the book's female lead, and romantic interest. She's described as being a pro-active, go-getter, starting her own brand, finding fame on her own merit, and being really good at games. She frequently surpasses Parvizal in many of the challenges, yet when she returns after Parvizal's own character arc, has a real life physical insecurity that acts as a transparent tool for Parvizal to show he doesn't care. Essentially turning these characters into a "You're fine as you are." "Really?!" type relationship.
The book is littered with more character-driven moments, or should I say Parvizal driven moments, that are outrageous in concept. He is fabled and forgiven for his poor social trepidation after pulling off the 'impossible'. There's a whole page of hype compliments to him, where he acts humble and analytical to be the cool guy. He pulls of a single man heist against one of the world's largest organizations. When facing a new problem that seems near impossible to solve, the characters are saved by a near literal 'god' moment of deus ex machina.
All in all, the world is worth exploring, this book seems like it was written to be a movie. Whether or not the book deserves praise is up to your own opinion. To me, it seems almost insulting to other writers, in an already flawed rating system. Can all the world's products be saturated within a 0-10 star rating system? I'm watching the movie next week with the team at Alta. Them not having read the book, being VR developers, and generally less critical than I am of these things, will be interesting to see their thoughts.
My fear is that now when I say I'm a VR developer, I'll get asked if I've seen or heard of Ready Player One. Thankfully I can point them to this. Let's hope I don't have to write one about Sword Art Online.
Thanks for reading.