Hi folks, this’ll be my first official book review. I read through the entirety of Ready Player One over the last week and a half, and now I’m going to give you my honest thoughts on it. This review will be mostly casual, and because I hated this book, very negative criticism.

Rating⌗

This book sucks. Don’t read it. Its not worth your time. I can’t believe this rag was published. Or even got a movie deal. Actually, I’m doubly surprised that it got a movie deal, what with all the IP licensing involved.

Summary⌗

For those of you that haven’t read Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, let me save you the trouble. Our protagonist’s name is Wade Owen Watts. The year is 2044. And Cline has a self-insert manic-pixie dead billionaire who’s last will and testament were to gift his entire fortune to whoever can find his easter egg hidden within his creation, The OASIS. The OASIS is your typical virtual reality cyberspace akin to Neuromancer’s Matrix or Snow Crash’s Metaverse. This last will and testament causes a revival of 1980’s nostalgia and culture. The easter egg hunters are known as “gunters” and Wade is a gunter.

This manic-pixie dead billionaire’s backstory is lifted almost wholesale from one very specific game developer who’s name I don’t remember, even down to the “starting sierrasoft by copying floppy disks and selling them to the local computer store”. This is worth noting because James Halliday, a literal billionaire, is never characterized as having done anything wrong. “He’s just a misunderstood genius, I swear” or some such bootlicking nonsense.

The long and the short is that Wade is nearly killed repeatedly on his way to win the inheritance by the long-standing rivals of the gunters, the sixers – employees of the megacorp of the week, IOI – who are also trying very hard to find the easter egg.

However, referring to any of this as anything other than a quest or a contest is literally insane. The point of an easter egg is that nobody knows about its existence until it is first discovered, and discovery on its own is the reward. It appears that Cline has misunderstood this.

Scathing Criticism⌗

So, part of my criticism is engendered by the fact that Ready Player One was described to me as a cyberpunk novel. I won’t name names, as that’s rude, but the person that described Ready Player One as cyberpunk has fundamentally misunderstood what cyberpunk is on several levels. That being said, Cline has himself misunderstood far more than just what an easter egg is.

In fact, there are several points where engagement with his influences is topical at best. This is a signature nostalgia ploy similar to the anime series Hi Score Girl (2018), except with the 80’s instead of the 90’s. For example, Cline very topically interacts with Star Trek, mentioning the Kobayashi Meru and dressing a few characters that show up just barely in the drip, as if we needed to know the clothing choices of some rando we read two whole sentences about. Or perhaps the whole influence (as described in the book) of the hunt for an easter egg (which for some reason, is a literal egg?), Adventure. The 1980 video game developed for the Atari 2600 had a secret room, the alleged first easter egg (spoiler alert: the earliest known easter egg was in 1973’s Moonlander for PDP-10 and PDP-11 systems). Adventure sees just a few pages worth of reference in the book, and that appears to be the most we get. Its ultimately a short description of the easter egg in the game, and very brief descriptions of Wade playing it. Also a summary.

And that brings me directly to misinformation. This book is full of half-remembered slop and outright lies. The one that hits closest to home for me? Cline claims that John Draper was one of the first phone phreaks (telephone system hackers), blatantly ignoring the deep cultural history dating back to 1946 with the Tech Model Railroad Club, who began the phreaking movement primarily by repurposing old telephone equipment to run their model railroad. In the 60’s and 70’s there were several one-off conventions much like DEFCON or BlackHat today specifically geared toward phone phreaks (and AT&T hated them). In the 70’s AT&T allegedly committed the largest known illegal wire-tapping operation to attempt to catch phreaks abusing the phone system (and violated the expected privacy of millions of Americans in the process). The Blue Box Wikipedia article alludes to this, and lines up with testimonies of phreaks from the time period.

Cline instead claims wholeheartedly that John Draper (also known as Cap’n Crunch) was one of the first phreaks. Probably because John Draper made national news by demonstrating that the toy whistle that came in Captain Crunch cereal at the time was capable of producing a perfect 2600 Hz tone. John Draper was an influential and important phreak, don’t get me wrong, but to claim he was among the first spits on the already 20 years of deeply important history surrounding the culture.

I can’t really fault Cline entirely for this, either. This information is hard to find even on the modern internet, let alone in 2009/2010 when he was writing this book. Most of my sources on here are excerpts from documentaries, such as Code 2600 (2011), The Hacker’s Handbook by Dr. K, and Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy.

On the topic of hackers, what’s the fascination with WarGames? If you are somehow idolizing hackers (which it appears this book is, to some degree), then you should consider WarGames a punch in the face. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) was penned and rushed through the legislative branch in an overly-broad state specifically because WarGames put the fear of nuclear war at the hands of hackers into our lawmakers. The CFAA has resulted in thousands of hackers doing otherwise completely fine things ending up in jail. Just to prove a point, the CFAA is so broadly written that if you picked up a flashdrive off the ground and accessed it from your computer, you have “accessed a data system without authorization” and have committed a crime punishable by at least ten years in prison. Nobody would charge you for this unless that flashdrive had corporate or state secrets, of course, but the point still stands.

Cline did zero research into what he was writing, with only a handful of exceptions. And one of Cline’s biggest failures in convincing storycraft? Where are all the women? There are three women in the story: Art3mis, the primary love interest for the protagonist; Aech, who you don’t know is a woman until three quarters of the way into the book; and Kira, Cline’s self-insert manic-pixie dead billionaire’s unrequited love, who also happens to be dead, and is mentioned only in passing a handful of times. For a pre-gamergate gamer culture book, you’d think that’s actually pretty good, but I don’t think its good enough.

The male gaze in this novel is so thick I could cut it with a knife, eat a chunk, and come out the other side a chouvenist pig.

And while we’re on the topic of women, I really should have expected the transphobia in this book. I did not expect the phrase “Adult Human Female” to be on that bingo card. Nor did I expect a random page extolling the virtues of masturbation. This book is a mess of deranged ramblings from someone suffering a mid-life crisis.

This may be a narration choice, but Wade frequently refers to events that happened less than a week ago as having happened “months ago”, which frequently had me questioning how time was flowing or perceived in this book. The grammar and spelling is fine, but little details like this really made me feel like nobody actually checked the actual content of the book before giving it the green light. Or didn’t bother to engage with it enough to notice, I suppose.

Ready Player One is a book that wears its influences on its sleeve like a coat, but when it gets comfy and hangs its coat, you’ll notice that the only thing interesting about it was its fancy drip. Cline tries very hard to craft a tale inspired by his favourite 80’s films, and only succeeded in writing yet more mediocre scifi slop with a barely cohesive plot, that relies on his protagonist somehow being more knowledgable about 80’s culture than anyone else, which is laughable at best, and insulting to the dedication of actual nerds at worst. Quit playing pretend grandpa, your wannabe skiddie is as lame as your constant nostalgiagasm book.

Praise⌗

This book was at least entertaining enough that I didn’t absolutely dread picking it up.

Aech being a gay woman of colour was neat, I guess?

I don’t know, really, I’m grasping at straws here. I’ve certainly read worse books, but all of them were self-published web-novels. And if that’s the highest praise I can give to Ready Player One, then it probably shouldn’t have been published. Actually, maybe this calls into question the reputation of the publishing house for Ready Player One, Crown Publishing Group (a division of Penguin Random House). This is gross negligence on their part.

I’m Trying Here⌗

Look, I really wish this book wasn’t trash. Its got a lot of really interesting influence, and the pieces are all there to make something really interesting. Instead, we got a peek into the mind of the average gamer circa 2011, a bland story, and some barely coherent ramblings of its author.

I wanted Ready Player One to be good. Games are important as an artform. History is important. The 80’s were important to one degree or another. But this left me feeling as empty as Hi-Score Girl. The plot was full of clichés. Everything interesting was lifted almost wholesale from somewhere else. And how tone-deaf do you have to be to write a novel almost entirely in cyberspace where the entire point of the book is to tell gamers to get away from their screens? Especially when the only indication that cyberspace is bad is coming from the most milquetoast unrelatable buffoon of a protagonist I’ve ever had the pleasure of hating. Ernest Cline didn’t care about games, history, or even the 80’s. He cared about making his world look cool, and he used everything he could as set dressing to distract from how fucking pitiful this book actually is.

“It occurred to me then that for the first time in as long as I could remember, I had absolutely no desire to log back into the OASIS.”

Thanks Cline. Next time show us how Wade’s life is better by not wanting to be plugged in.