Ready Player One - Spielberg takes on the king of MMOs.

Movies
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I will note that those passages, dropped sans context, are probably the most dense and worst possible examples you could give. Other times you get something like making the arcade tradition of placing a quarter on a machine to designate you as ‘next’ and integrating that into the story progression.

We also see a deeper exploration of why many of those things were loved, told as only someone who loved them can. Sure some are gratuitous, the X-wing in particular has little plot relevance (and only appears like 2-3 times). But then you get Rush and Schoolhouse Rock fundamentally informing the story, and I am down with that. The very fundamental nature of many of those games isn’t glossed over, but treated with both reverence and acknowledging their product of their times.

It has one of the most authentic ‘this is who I was as a kid, and this is why these things are important to me’ moments too. The visit to the bedroom of the creator had a real touch of honesty about it.

So while it is possible to excise a few passages that seem like a jumbled reference soup, to describe the book as an empty ‘hey wasn’t that cool’ is to miss the point entirely.

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I gotta admit that Lacuna Coil was my first entry into the wider world of underground music, especially metal. It was the first experience of music that existed beyond the bounds of radio, and showed me that it was good. Better than the radio for damn sure.

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Magic Mike is a better movie than Interstellar.

There, I said it.

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That’s marginally more encouraging to read, @CraigM. You’re bad at selling this book, @stusser!

Thanks for the extra insight. I don’t think I’ll be grabbing a copy anytime soon, but your post’s probably the first one to make me think I’d be willing to.

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I’m sorry you’re as thin skinned as our president and can’t handle something you like being criticized without taking it personally. Is that direct enough for you?

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So let me lay the sales pitch. We have a very Penbladian cyberpunk dystopia setting. The world has gone to shit, with automation basically creating a permanent underclass, and extreme stratification due to lack of financial opportunity. So people exist in this state of burned out depression, with the virtual world providing the only means of pretty much anything. Education, entertainment, hell even for many their only hope of marginal employment.

Enter our protagonist. A teenager whose home life is utterly devoid of any meaning. He goes to school and eekes out what marginal social function he has through socializing on this network. The founder, upon his his death and owing to his Bill Gates rich status, has created a trust that allows everyone access to this world for free. He even helped create the means for the virtual school system, and established the trust, so that the world can exist and evolve for all, instead of becoming another tool of the mega corporations to exert control over the people. So he created his trust to have a means of appointing a successor, a series of trials to prove oneself worthy.

So our hero sets off on a journey that will propel him on challenges modeled after the formative experiences of the creator. Through them you will learn not just what, but why, these things informed who he was, and what was important about them. Many of them can only be solved by not only knowing what, but why, something was formative. I mean one puzzle is literally solved by ‘faith, hope, and charity’ Schoolhouse Rock, where the key to solving it is literally friendship. It’s at once cheesy in the same saccharine way that the original was, because it was goddamn Schoolhouse Rock! It was indended to be an optimistic, if a bit cheesy, vehicle for teaching kids. If you’re going to make Schoolhouse Rock the answer, then it needs to have some kind of integration of the life lesson, you know?

All wrapped up in a meta narrative of our heroes trying to solve this ahead of Evil Corp*, who employs an army of hunters to try and discover the clues first. But ultimately they fall short because while they knew the references, they didn’t understand the meaning if you catch my drift. All interspersed with invocations into the history and memory of the creator, giving a look into what these things meant for him.

Basically the whole plot of the book isn’t ‘these things are cool’, rather ‘these things were important to me, and here is why’. Does it sometimes tilt too far? Certainly. Is it great prose? No, but it is far better than those excerpts would indicate. But it is an earnest love letter to geek culture that understands them, not simply parrots them for mass market success.

*not the real name

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I WAS A PUNK BEFORE YOU

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Yeah, I find it hard to criticize the book for the nostalgia, as the entire point of the book is this kid’s connection to this lost and lonely genius through pop culture.

Not only that, but the movie made a strong impression on me that the creator of Oasis suffered from his inability to remove himself from that nostalgia.

It is a really good book in the same way the hunger games books are. Not historically significant prose, just very well told stories.

I really dislike Wil Wheaton, and nerd Mashup culture as a whole, but the audiobook, narrated by Wil himself didn’t turn me off. I couldn’t put this down, I love sci fi, I thought the VR tech in the book was cool, and the main character is likeable due to his earnest love of pop culture and poor underdog status.

I should have despised this book, look at how much handwringing I did over the MST3K reboot… But I am not ashamed to say I loved this book.

Ernest Cline knows how to write an adventure novel, and I found it engaging. Looking at random excerpts make it look bad in the context of a forum of adults or on random Twitter influencer feeds. But from the perspective of the protagonist, a poor 15 year old, it feels exceedingly earnest

Cline.

Sorry about that. I had to.

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Way to make my subtext joke and run it into the ground ;)

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I did not catch that. Sorry for trampling your subtlety.

If you want the better written adult version of this book, check out Reamde, though I am sure there is a backlash around that book too now.

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There’s always backlash on Stephenson.

I’ve got most of his books in paper, including that one.

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Reamde is pretty awesome. Seveneves was good, until Stephenson decided to start a new book in a book.

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Message spoiled for adult verbiage.

Well I didnt take it personally until now but hey by all means show me how thick skinned you are.

Perhaps you should be less of an asshole. Is that direct enough for you?

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Not if you bring snacks ;)

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Watch out. There be @tomchick in these here parts.

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Honestly, I enjoyed the book, though the biggest thing that’s stuck with me was his weird transformation into an übermensch after the first clue was found, where he was doing nothing but working out, shaving, and searching for the next clue.

My closest cultural touchstone to this book was Skyrim. I was listening to the audiobook while playing Skyrim, so, when playing the remastered edition, I came across a dungeon I thought I hadn’t done before, got to the boss fight, and remembered exactly where I was in RP1 because of how much trouble I originally had with that boss. It was a weird sensation to say the least.

As an Oklahoman, I can say we’re all a little incensed the setting was changed. I mean, hell, we were ready to OWN those stacked trailer parks. My main issue with the trailer is that I only recognized a handful of references, and that took me my second viewing to see anything past the Iron Giant.

The closest we’re going to get to the vast amount of licenses it would’ve taken to get RP1 right was the LEGO Movie (and, as an extension of that, LEGO Batman). I’ll be interested to see if someone attempts at some point to create a fanedit pulling the realworld of RP1 and LEGO together to at least get some semblance of the book.

Otherwise, this is a less interesting TRON: Legacy, and we know how little love there is for that film.

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Oh yeah geez TRON: Legacy really fizzled. Not bad per se just not … good. Hopefully RP1 does better than that but we’ll see.

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Actually, I liked the Willy Wonka music in the first half of the trailer better.

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But had nothing to do with the book, AFAIK (at least as I recall). Rush played a huge part.

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True, but with cinematic scores, I’m more interested in how the music fits the movie, rather than the source material. The focus of the trailer was that the Oasis is limited only by imagination, which made the Wonka music a perfect fit.