Ready Player One
Summary
Cline's 2011 novel is set in 2045 in a United States degraded by energy shortage and economic collapse, where most people spend their lives in the OASIS, a shared virtual environment that functions as school, workplace and social world. Its creator, James Halliday, dies and leaves his controlling stake and fortune to whoever solves a series of puzzles hidden inside it, all keyed to 1980s popular culture.
The plot follows teenager Wade Watts competing against other independent hunters and against Innovative Online Industries, a corporation attempting to win in order to commercialise the OASIS by imposing advertising and subscription fees. The corporate antagonist employs indentured workers and kills competitors in the physical world.
The elements of interest to a technology readership are the depiction of a virtual economy with real value, the treatment of a private platform as effectively public infrastructure, the question of who controls a space that everyone depends on, and the indentured servitude system that follows from consumer debt.
The book is heavily criticised on literary grounds. The 1980s references are listed rather than used, the protagonist wins repeatedly through recall of trivia, the characters are thin, and the prose is functional. The treatment of the escapist premise is uncritical for most of its length, though the ending gestures at it. Its business relevance is limited to the platform governance question and to its influence on how people talk about virtual worlds. Readers wanting a serious treatment of these questions should read Stephenson instead.
Key takeaways 7
- A privately owned virtual environment can become the space where education, work and social life occur, which makes its ownership a question of public consequence.
- Value created inside a virtual economy is real value, and the currency, items and property inside such a system function economically like their physical equivalents.
- A corporation acquiring control of shared infrastructure would monetise it in ways that degrade it for the users who depend on it.
- Consumer debt enforced through indentured labour is presented as the mechanism by which a corporation obtains a workforce it fully controls.
- Escapism into a virtual environment is a rational response to a degraded physical world, which is why the population chooses it.
- A creator can attempt to control the future of their platform after death through the conditions attached to inheritance, and the novel treats this as legitimate.
- Anonymity in a shared virtual space allows people to present differently from their physical identity, with consequences the novel raises but does not resolve.
Who should read it
Readers wanting a light treatment of virtual world platform control and virtual economies, with the literary limits understood in advance.
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