Book Review: Ready Player One

Title: Ready Player One

Author: Ernest Cline

In the year 2044, virtual worlds with virtual reality (OASIS) have conquered our lives to the point of people just wanting to be online instead of living a mostly miserable life in a devastated real world. This virtual reality is monetized not only by selling virtual goods, but by charging for virtual transport, both inside and between planets of this "virtual galaxy", where both magic and science-fiction go hand-by-hand, and when the creator dies of old, he leaves a test: He who finds and opens three special gates with three special keys and gathers a special egg will inherit the full multi-billion legacy and would become the owner of OASIS company. Just that and a simple riddle. Years later, Wade, a "gunter" (otaku-like but obsessed with finding the price) just finds the first clue...

Imagine Second Life and Oculus were the biggest hit to ever happen to humanity. Imagine that the creator of the VR is the biggest geek you can imagine (80's movies, shows, music, RPGs, videogames and arcades), and then pour in a huge amount of geeky examples that range from iconic videogames to movie monsters, anime mechas, classical pen and paper roleplaying game character archeotypes... All mixed in what I'd call a nerd version of Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory: an awesome price and legacy to obtain, a crazy owner with "a crazy world built" with weird situations and where some youngsters have to complete challenges.

The result. is curious, to say the least. It hits really hard on the nostalgia part, so if you have memories from the 80s or early 90s it will probably hook you up. I read the first half of the book almost in a single sit, because all this MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online game) with wizards and plasma rifles, some cool VR ideas (like a teacher navigating with the class inside a 3D human hearth to explain how it works from the inside), the mystery of the first riddles and really tons and tons and tons of geek references make it enjoyable, at least for a while. The story itself is not brilliant but when starting, when learning about this virtual world and what happened until 2044, that discovery phase is great, and afterwards it like loses energy; At least for me, it started to be more "convenient", with some big speedups at certain times (e.g. so that bad boys catch-up with good boys) and other times slowdowns to detail fragments that were not so interesting, some obscure scoreboard update rules (again to better fit certain plot events). Having a magical sci-fi world means there are no rules and everything (that comes from the author) is valid. And finally. the geek references get overabused but not always fit well, and yes, is fun to find some not so trivial ones like aliases from Big Trouble in Little China or anagrams from The Sneakers but... one gets tired when it becomes the main drive of the whole book.

It is not that I didn't enjoyed the book, because I did, but I was hoping for a more complex plot in a more restrained "ruleset". It made me want to watch again some movies and play some videogames, though :)