Ready Player One is a story about a boy who immerses himself into the virtual reality universe called the OASIS: a place where virtually everyone escapes the ruined, futuristic world around them. Wade Watts, known as his character name of Parzival, is on the hunt along with several others to find the Easter Egg within the expansive virtual reality world put forth by the creator of the OASIS. The creator James Halliday, who is known as Anorak, was an anorak of 80s pop culture who let his love and influence of the era drive many of the multiple worlds.
I love fun stories. I love the 80s pop culture. I love vintage gaming and computing history. So you would be sure that this book is for me (and you’d be right). I hold his book to be a new classic like many of my fellow nerds. I understood almost all of the references save knowing what some D&D module’s story and cover looked like. I knew what the “Captain” clue meant before I finished reading the whole clue. Ernest Cline wrote a pretty good story here, even if you were to tone down some of the pop culture references. The book is not without its faults, however. The only major fault that I can recall is that the book started to feel like it was taking shortcuts after a while. It made callbacks to all sorts of pop culture references to paint a glorious picture. The trouble was that all it had to do was to say that robots were Johnny 5s or there were Tron light cycles and then no description was given to those readers that didn’t actually know what they were. Though I never had a problem picturing most of these references, it did feel like a story-telling shortcut at some point, often breaking the “show, don’t tell” mentality. Why describe what Johnny 5 looks like when you can just say “there Johnny 5s” moving crates? The book obviously rewards those who know circa ’80s pop culture, and I appreciated that reminiscence, but could fall flat for the uninformed. The structure of the story made sense and the book had a fairly balanced timeline. The world-building was pretty extensive so it easily placed you into the world but it wasn’t overbearing as to be straining the overall story. I felt that Ready Player One was easy to read. The book shows that implementing uncommon vocabulary isn’t needed to write a great story, that reading level does not equate to quality. It’s ineffable to me that sanctimonious egotists believe that unconventional expressions, lexemes, and locutions makes you a superior ink slinger. In short, it’s not about the complexity of your vocabulary but it’s how you write a story, and Ernest Cline made a pretty interesting read.