I just finished reading Ready Player One and holy god damn shit...

I just finished reading Ready Player One and holy god damn shit. It's been awhile since I read a book and this one had me zoned out for four hours reading the ending to it.

What are Veeky Forumss opinions on the book or the upcoming movie coming out in two years? Also, any recommendations for future books? I loved everything about this book and I want more.

lame ass bait

Book is truly terrible.

Suffers from the same flaw of thinking that references are inherently worthwhile that cripples Family Guy and Ulysses.

pretty awful and without any substance.

no likeable characters whatsoever.

main character is especially insufferable.

makes harry potter look like a god damn masterpiece.

OP it's okay. Most litizens (me included) don't like it, but we just have different tastes. I know the book isn't quite fantasy, but perhaps you'd like Perdido Street Station or Book of the New Sun

I just read this as well, and though it was a fun read it was ultimately very shallow. It felt like the characters were going through the motions of a plotline just to get all the 80s references in.

I know it wasn't the objective of the book, either, but I really felt that perhaps the author could have done a little more exploration into the virtual reality bit. He treats the characters all having dual identities and virtual reality as some normal thing, like a natural extension of having a screenname in modern society, but I think that even in forty years time we won't be 100% adjusted to the idea of a virtual world.

And yet the OASIS has essentially replaced reality for many people, seemingly with no crisis of identity, or anything like, "if we can simulate reality now, is our reality a simulation?" or any sort of deeper ideas than that.

I never got that feeling about the references, but most of them missed me anyway. I never was into a lot of the movies or cartoons referenced in the book.

Also, seeing as how all currency is apparently "credits" in the book, the real world is apparently a gross smoggy disgusting mess no matter where you go, and OASIS is more or less free, why wouldn't you want to?

I am curious about all the money random monsters drop too though. Does that mean you could pay your rent by just raiding some high reward quests over and over again? Maybe I missed something.

I'll have to look into those. I posted here like ten minutes after I finished the book and it's 7:26AM now, so I'll check those out later. Kudos for managing to not be a royal cunt like everyone else about a book you didn't like.

Don't get me wrong, I want to play with the Vive and Oculus Rift too, but when you ask me if I want to replace my reality with a virtual one 90% of the time? That's when I start to get a bit uncomfortable.

Even then, how do you determine who the real you is? Look at Aech. In the OASIS she's a good-looking chill white dude, right? But in real life she's a fairly hefty black girl roaming the land in an RV. One would think it wouldn't be any more deep than, making a false identity online in modern times, or identifying as another gender, but in the OASIS you're experiencing everything as you would if you had that form. Where does the real you begin and end in that situation? The author doesn't even begin to tackle that.

The real world is also supposed to be shit, as you said, but they don't really explore it too well outside of the beginning (Which could really be any sort of low-income housing situation) and some throwaway lines like, "I boarded the bus which had armed guards to protect us from raiders" or "Indentured servants often preferred their lives as indents over life in the wilds, because at least they wouldn't starve to death."

Hell that last line introduces another mess of problems. Some of the characters complain about how people are lucky to get a job so they don't starve to death and die, and how jobs are so scarce, yet later on in the book we see that IOI regularly abducts people to put them to work. They even have a whole branch of the company dedicated to it. So then where's the conflict? Why don't all the desperate people get themselves into debt so they can get food?

RE: The references, I was rather annoyed at all the namedropping in the book. It's like it was screaming, "Look at me! Look how cool I am for knowing all these 80s things!"

I feel you being uncomfortable with it. I read that he's working on two sequels or prequels or something already, so maybe he'll tackle it then?

Also, I've always had that issue about the whole "if you're homeless and shit why not get thrown in jail" thing. Especially with IOI having a bunch of slaves working off their credit card debt that they never actually get to pay off.

I still don't feel any animosity toward the references, myself. I never was into giant kaiju movies, but even I'm pretty hype for a Mecha Godzilla vs. Ultraman fight. whenever the movie comes out. I didn't really get most of the movie references or anything like that, so maybe it's not as bad if you don't get them. They didn't feel like they were being aggressively rubbed in my face or anything, at any rate.