Ready Player One - Updated Thoughts

Roughly a year ago I reviewed the book Ready Player One to which my overall thoughts were positive and I enjoyed it. I didn't think it was a masterpiece like everyone else did, but still found it to be a fun book. Since then, something interesting has happened. A while ago I was speaking to a friend of mine about the book and he really didn't like it, and he had some really good points about it. For example the main character Parzival would often come across a challenge, e.g. a videogame and he just so happened to have logged in 1,000 hours of playing that game and is a master at it, even though it was never mentioned prior in the book. He pointed out that the book had many plot issues like that and I thought it was a really good point, so I decided to take another look at the book and honestly he's right, there is a lot in here to dislike that I didn't notice on my first read.

Now before I actually get to that, let's talk about what in the book I still think works and that is the relationship between the main trio. I think Parzival and Aech still have a believable friendship with good dialogue. I also think the romance between Parzival and Art3mis is the best part of the book, it's the portion that feels the most genuine with a lot of emotions and humanity behind it, not relying on references to other things for people to like it, but letting the characters actually behave like people and see the romance blossom naturally.

But with that being said now whenever I think of this book I think of all the negative things first. There are still all the issues I mentioned in my original review about the plot being generic, the references being self-indulgent and manipulative, and the criticisms by friend pointed out. But I really came to realise that while Parzival's relationships are strong, the character itself is kind of horrendous. Oh, not because of who he is as a character, but what he represents.

This book takes escapist fiction to an insanely unhealthy degree. Most of fiction is escapist in someway, especially adventure stories. Superheroes, Star Wars, Harry Potter, on some level we enjoy it because it lets us forget about our crappy lives for 2 hours and imagine ourselves in these characters shoes. This book however portrays a character who also indulges himself in escapist fiction, but he does literally nothing but that. Everything he achieves is because he dedicated his life to watching TV shows, playing videogames and basically blocking himself out of reality. And that is an incredibly unhealthy message to portray in your story, you're basically saying "Yes, shut out all of reality, if you submit yourself to entertainment for your entire life you'll definitely live a fulfilling and successful life".

Yes, I'm the type of person who loves to indulge themselves in a lot of media, I love watching TV shows and playing videogames and I also love talking about and making them. But do you know what else I like to do? I like to go to the pub with my friends, I like to go for walks in the countryside, I like going to the gym, I like experiencing things that can't be experienced through a monitor. As someone that wants to make films and any other form of entertainment in the future, the best advice I've ever heard from professionals is that you have to live life. You can't make good fiction if you don't experience reality. So even the people who want you to see their products are also telling you to go outside. This book goes against that, it tells you that dedicating your life to being an anti-social shut in who does nothing but over-saturate themselves in media, you will live a good life and I'm sorry, that's not true, and that is a very awful and manipulative message to send out to people.

The two worst things that a product can be is either A: Boring or B: Immoral and granted while I doubt this book was written with the intent of saying the anti-social life is the superior life, it certainly exploits and encourages those who already do live that life and that is honestly kind of pathetic. So those were my updated thoughts on Ready Player One. Do I like it? No. Am I looking forward to the movie? Not really. Will I see it? ...Sure. But only cause it's Spielberg, I'm hoping he can correct this.

-Danny