Review: Ready Player One

Review: Ready Player One by Ernst Cline

2012. Arrow Books/Random House: London. 

I. 

(The actual review)

You want to root for Wade Watts, the hero of Ready Player One because he’s a noble orphan from Oklahoma who lives in ‘the stacks’. 

The orphan (we know from Shekhar Kapoor’s Mr. India) is the best sort of 80s hero. The stacks are a type of futuristic American Dharavi made of piles of trailers. The dystopia is a world that has run out of conventional energy sources and one where everyone nonetheles spends a lot of time jacked into an MMORPG: the O.A.S.I.S. 

The novel is told as Watts’s official set-the-record-straight account of how he won an easter egg challenge (the  gamer term for a game hidden within a much larger one) in O.A.S.I.S. and inherited the billions of the deceased game creator’s estate, Willy Wonka or as he is known in this work, Steve Jobs Halliday. 

At stake here are the ownership rights to determine the future of O.A.S.I.S. Another evil corporation, an internet service provider, wants to acquire O.A.S.I.S by using any means possible, including murder to win the game. The immersive experience facilitates a virtual school program for impoverished children like Watts, and the internet company *gasp* wants to charge fees for access that would lock them out permanently. Owners of Microsoft’s xbox will appreciate the dangers of these evil money grubbing corporations as will students of telecommunication monopoly regulation as it applies to vertical and horizontal linkages. Regulators are supposed to stop ISPs from abusing their dominant positions to control the market- but some allowance should be made for this story because there is generally insufficient regulator capacity in dystopias.

Halliday’s maniacal obsession for his childhood inspires him to base his easter egg game challenge in the world of 80’s social imagination works: John Hughes high school films and other science fiction epics dating to this era, as well as novels, music and of course, the video games themselves. The neat thing is that you can play an antique console inside the video game. Cline embellishes Watts’ account of his life superbly and justifies the premise of his story: a rich vein of lore, explored already by shows such as the holy trinity of American animations shows- The Simpsons, Southpark and Family Guy but most iconically, The Big Bang Theory. 

The reader is indeed treated to a rich buffet of geekery. People who can’t enjoy such novels should immediately have Terminators sent after them.

***

II. 

(Incidental and tangential theorising about stuff in the novel that is not really relevant to anything in particular):

Before a larger discussion about a world dominating video game, the philanthropy/political power of the billionaire technologist duo who invented it and the vested interests that try to control such technology- the subject matter of Ernst Cline’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory meets The Matrix story- some basic explanations are warranted. 

One of the earliest recorded warnings about the virtual comes from the epic prude Plato. In the Phaedrus (274-7) and the Seventh Letter, he has Socrates say that writing was inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can only be in the mind. Plato’s Socrates urges that writing destroys memory and therefore, it weakens the mind. The point is best illustrated by Ramadhir Singh from Gangs of Wasseypur: Part II. In one of the most powerful moments of reflexivity in Indian cinema, the character expounds his philosophy on why he has out-lived nearly three generations of the family of his sworn enemy. 

Singh chortles and says, ‘Kyunki mein picture nahin dekhta.’ [I don’t watch movies]. 

Ramadhar Singh embodies Platonic virtue by being able to tell real life from fiction.
In this still he is seen using cutting edge Bihari technology.

[My knowledge of classical Greek philosophy, obvs, is not exactly Level: Public school cum Rowing Blues. The above was jhapped from Walter Ong who suggests that writing is a type of technology similar to the steam engine or the computer, and a method of recreating speech. Wish I knew this in Class I and skipped on handwriting homework as a conscientious abstainer.]

***

III. More tangential theorising; the difference between nerds, geeks, hackers and Other.

To understand the world of the digital fantastic we should proceed with some definitional clarity. Especially, the terms ‘nerd’, ‘geek’, ‘hacker’ and of course, reading the category ejusdem generis, Other.

[For a discussion about the origins of the term ‘hacker’, see Atari v. Sports Soo: Part III (Goliath’s Slingshot); For why Others are important in definitional schemes, see, Review: The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by G.W. Dahlquist.]

An extended member of the community that likes to consume entertainment with a speculative bent, usually with something to do with outer space or War of the Roses history with vampires, zombies and dragons, is commonly known as a ‘geek’.  Geeks should not be mistaken for ‘nerds’ but they are often confused. 

The distinction is sometimes lost but is important: a nerd is someone who gets top grades, especially at math and science but does not necessarily consume speculative fiction or computer games (especially, those nerds who are too busy focusing on the academic curriculum to enjoy themselves through recreation). Geeks are a wider sub-culture. One does not require ace grades for membership. However, the act of ‘nerding’ can apply to anyone studying very hard.

Dilton Doiley- from Archie comics.
Nerd, but geek and hacker also?

Indians, those who have access to education, ethnically fall almost exclusively in the nerd category. The bad students simply fade away, ne’er to be seen again or, are shot by the police. The only good students who shoot the police (in real life, not video games) are Maoists. 

India does, however, have a small tribe of geeks. The ‘international school’ variety, the Marwari technophile and the Punjabi hardboi “jaanta nahin mera baap kaun hai” (and including, yours truly- the private sector Other). This ordinarily would be the preliminary to another rant about import-substitution, crony capitalism and the damage gold-hoarding does to India’s forex reserves (which could otherwise have funded consumer spending) but it is sufficient to say that government policy and other cultural factors, including a morbid fear of modern technology, have gone someway in dissuading a larger culture of geekdom. Even so, most of the sub-culture that Ernst Cline refers to in this book should be known to Cable Television Generation One. One exception being some super arcane cyber-punk hard rock album length anthems based on video gaming that never made it to Channel [V] .

***

IV. On Other types; the cultural relevance of the geek-hacker-nerd hybrid

An important type of Other is the geek-nerd hybrid. 

The geek-nerd is the bottom segment of the nerd society. 

For instance, a geek-nerd only barely squeezes into his school’s quiz team but never succeeds in defeating the uber-nerds. However, he does manage to get a date with the only girl at the event because he looks like Hercules by comparison to the in the gathered company.

A geeky nerd is cooler than a nerd.

The geek-nerd schism is important because, while nerds like the scientists (Slug Russell) may have made the first computer games, it was the geek-nerd (Nolan Bushnell) in the room who attempted to make money from the idea. They didn’t have a chance of getting grant funding so they went to Wall Street for money. They are the ones who designed and manufactured the machines that spawned geekery. Being a hacker-geek-nerd, like Wade Watts is, is like getting three bars in intelligence jackpot lottery. 

The matter cannot be made clearer than this.

In Heather Brooke’s The Revolution will be Digitised we see how digitisation of information has facilitated information activists, even the creepy-rapey narcissist Julian Assange, to make public shameful atrocities that powerful governments commit and then use secrecy laws to hide. We are long way from Watergate where a source had to painstakingly and at great personal risk photocopy each page of a file sought to be leaked and when it was lost, do it all over again. Bradley Manning could transfer entire archives of the US government onto tiny portable flash drives. As all this leaky business indicates, geeks, nerds and hackers may have awkward social skills but they manage to make themselves available to power hierarchies, sometimes strengthening them and sometimes weakening them. 

Technology, as novels like this illustrate, serves a dual and somewhat paradoxical purpose. From Egyptian times when Pharaohs attempted to hoard occult information for their blood lines but ended up disseminating the hidden knowledge to artisan’s daughters and future Egyptologists, technology has served as a means of social control, but also as a means of social liberation. 

The gadgets we own poke out from a graveyard of devices that stretch as far as the eye can see. The critical battle we are currently witnessing is the size of the screen that people will prefer to utilise. Even the mighty Apple climbed down and released an iPad mini, a size choice earlier dismissed by Steve Jobs.  Indeed in Ready Player One the immersive experience that lays mankind to ruin is based on a visor and haptic gloves for feedback. The game-changer could be Google Glass.

An artist's impression of a scene from the novel (from the Ready Player One website).
Technology may help blind black people but they'll still be discriminated against.

The primary reason for Cline’s dystopia is the running out of fossil fuels. The powers of science to create problems of its own solution are often doubted. From Malthus (who finds faithful devotees in older Brits) and the eugenicists he inspired, the AIDS epidemic alarmists to climate change doomsday prophets. In time, all threats (so far) have been and hopefully, will be seen off by improved science. Not Monsanto but other nice science. 

It is unstated in the novel but perhaps it is Halliday’s challenge that has ensured the nerds and geeks who would normally solve such a puzzle were absorbed in something else leading to civilisation’s collapse. That’s cool. Also notable: how Cline has used the buddy duos at the heart of so many technology start-ups (Gates-Allen/ Jobs-Wozniak/Page-Brin) as a plot device.

The prose is so-so, Dan Brown-ish but the story more than makes up for it. Who knows- maybe a simple telling enhances it?

I liked this book very much.

References:

Brooke, Heather. (2011). The Revolution Will Be Digitised. Random House: London.

Ong, Walter (2002). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World. Routledge: London and New York.

See further:

Ernst Cline’s super cool DeLorean.

Khalnayak and violence in Allahabad (by Palash Krishan Mehrotra at The Big Indian Picture)
http://thebigindianpicture.com/2013/05/when-sanjay-met-pandey/