10 Brief thoughts on Ready Player One

It’s a classic Young Adult novel, so there really is no need to comment on it from a literary point of view, we all know what to expect. So, I’m just going to nitpick some bullshit and ignore the cringe-worthy dialogue.

1. Most players seem not to have any inertial emulation, yet motion sickness is never even mentioned.
2. Most players only have gloves and a visor, yet they’re able to freely move. It’s never explained.
3. The VR world in which they “live” is described as an Open Source utopia, but it’s really not. Everything in the game world is paid for with real money, including movement and higher education. Everything seems to be hosted by a massive corporation, which doesn’t seem to exercise much control on content, but charges out of the nose. Participation in the virtual world is needlessly restricted to those who can pay. The web is much more of an Open Source utopia than the OASIS.
   This is quite clearly to fit in with cyberpunk tropes, but it undermines the main narrative, the characters don’t really have anything worthwhile to protect.
4. Apparently there are VR elections, and it is stated that Will Wheaton and Cory Doctorow (hey, we all got the reference!) have been successfully defending user rights. What user rights?
5. All data stored in a user account is deleted when the avatar dies. This is about as user-hostile as one can get.
6. The novel is set in a near-future world in which society decays, mostly due to lack of petrol. However, unlike literally every historical precedent, people move to the cities, creating Africa-style shanty towns.
   An energy crisis is the perfect time to grow some cereals.
7. In order to make every reader feel included in the group of the nerds in-the-know, every single franchise is quoted. This results in whole pages of lists.
8. Despite spending most of the book praising the advantages of a virtual world, and how freeing it can be, the conclusion is a refuge to the real world, justified only by a lame teenage romance.
9. In the Italian translation the title was changed to just Player One. Of course this is a problem with the translation and not with the book itself, but come on, they expect teenagers not to know what “ready” means?
10. This is actually about the dialogue. When the protagonist meets the love interest they are each impressed that the other knows the origin of their name. I know it’s a dystopia, but come on, they still have school, everybody knows that stuff.

Basically, I’m a huge pretentious nerd, and this book came off as aimed at wannabe pretentious nerds, but it tries way too hard.