Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Ready Player One is a novel about a contest in which participants must log into a metaverse and solve a series of puzzles related to 1980s pop culture.  The first person to solve all the puzzles wins $240 billion, so the competition is fierce.  You have probably heard of Ready Player One: it quickly became a best-seller and was adapted into a film directed by Steven Spielberg.  

Reviews of Ready Player One have generally fallen into two categories.  Some reviewers have characterized it as dumb, but fun: according to NPR, Ready Player One is “more fun than a day at the arcade — you'll wish you could make it go on and on just by inserting more quarters.”  Others have characterized it as merely dumb.  Here is a particularly cantankerous review by the Daily Beast referring to it as “a terribly written piece of adolescent fantasy that, at heart, exemplifies everything wrong and repellent about modern nerd culture.”

This review offers a third perspective.  In my view, Ready Player One is an artistically significant novel.  I wouldn’t say it’s artistically great: the writing is clunky, there are plot holes, and although it generally moves briskly, some stretches are boring.  But it is artistically significant.  Not only does it have aesthetic value, but there are deep ideas embedded within it.  

I’ll divide this review into four parts:

1. Ready Player One as quasi-ethnic art.
2. Ready Player One and the things that matter in life.
3. Ready Player One hides evil in plain sight.
4. Ready Player One: a political novel.

Ready Player One as quasi-ethnic art

Ready Player One takes place in 2045, where things have really gone off the rails.  Excessive burning of fossil fuels has yielded a “global energy crisis,” “catastrophic climate change,” “half a dozen wars,” and even, through an unspecified mechanism, “killer viruses.”  

Happily, the Internet still works.  Billions of people use a virtual reality service known as “OASIS,” which is so popular that, we are told, “the terms ‘OASIS’ and ‘Internet’ gradually became synonymous.”  OASIS users wear visors and haptic gloves, so they can look around and touch things.  

OASIS’s creator, James Halliday, died with $240 billion and no heirs.  Halliday was obsessed with nerd culture from the 1980s – D&D, Atari video games, and so forth.  So he decided to give all his money away to the first person to find an extremely well-hidden easter egg in OASIS.  To find this easter egg, users must solve a series of obscure puzzles requiring in-depth knowledge of Halliday’s obsessions.  The solver must find three “keys” and then unlock three “gates,” so that’s six puzzles, plus, like in any good video game, there’s an endgame puzzle after that.  

Our hero, a teenager named Wade Watts, lives in the “stacks,” which are mobile homes stacked on top of one another, transforming them into “strange hybrids of shantytowns, squatter settlements, and refugee camps.”   Despite his challenging life circumstances, Wade has OASIS access.  Wade is obsessed with Halliday’s obsessions–he masters random 1980s video games, watches 1980s movies and TV, and generally learns everything there is to know about the 1980s.  

After Halliday dies, Wade–along with lots of other people–becomes a “gunter” (short for “Easter Egg hunter”).  The keys are so well-hidden that most gunters give up after awhile, but Wade perseveres.  

To give you a sense of what these puzzles are like, Halliday’s hint for the first puzzle is the following poem:

The Copper Key awaits explorers

In a tomb filled with horrors

But you have much to learn

If you hope to earn

A place among the high scorers.

Wade figures out that “a tomb filled with horrors” is a reference to a D&D supplement called Tomb of Horrors published in 1978 (this is a real thing).  Also, “you have much to learn” refers to the planet in OASIS where people go to virtual high school.  So, Wade uses “OASIS atlas software” to scan the planet for a topological feature that resembles the entrance to the Tomb of Horrors as described in the D&D supplement (if you must know, it’s “a low, flat-topped hill, about two hundred yards wide and three hundred yards long,” with black stones that are arranged in a pattern that resembles a human skull).  He then enters the Tomb of Horrors and has to bypass various obstacles that resemble the obstacles in the actual D&D supplement.  

When Wade gets to the bottom of the Tomb of Horrors, the final boss turns out to be an AI that Wade must defeat in the 1982 videogame “Joust.”  The AI is very good at Joust, but Wade is to 1980s video games what Usain Bolt is to sprinting, so Wade wins on his first try and gets the Copper Key.  This is just the first step in the Easter Egg hunt; there’s still the gate that’s opened by the Copper Key, two more keys, two more gates, the endgame, plus some side quests, such as one where Wade gets the highest theoretical score in Pac-Man, a feat not accomplished IRL until 19 years after Pac-Man came out.

The rest of the book walks through the rest of the puzzles, Wade’s budding love for a gunter who is essentially himself in female form, and Wade’s tangles with other gunters.  

Ready Player One is fun to read for the following reasons:

1. The puzzles are clever, although they’re so opaque that it’s impossible to figure them out on your own.

2. Wade is a hero, so it’s easy to root for him.  I’ve mentioned that he is the most skilled practitioner of early 1980s video games in world history.  He’s also the greatest savant of 1980s movies in world history.  Example: after getting the first key, Wade eventually makes his way to the first gate, in which he is required to recite the entire movie WarGames by heart.  He does this on the first try, without any preparation.  

3. If you are nostalgic towards the 1980s, Ready Player One is the book for you.  There are an unbelievable number of references to 1980s pop culture.  

Many of the 1980s pop culture references are integrated into the plot, as one would expect in a book that focuses on the need to solve puzzles requiring knowledge of 1980s pop culture.  But not all.  For example, early in the book, Wade has a conversation with his OASIS buddies where the following pieces of intellectual property are discussed: Contra, Golden Axe, Heavy Barrel, Smash TV, Ikari Warriors, Starlog, Ladyhawke, Rutger Hauer, Ewoks: The Battle for Endor, Caravan of Courage, Highlander II, Roy Batty, Ferris Bueller, WarGames, The Goonies, Superman, Legend, and Swordquest (Earthworld, Fireworld, Waterworld, and Airworld).  From a plot-development perspective, this conversation is completely unnecessary; I guess it’s intended to show that Wade and his friends love the 1980s, but as God is my witness, this conversation was not needed to make that point.  So why is it there?  One gets the sense that the author, Cline, loves the 1980s so much that he can’t help himself.

It is obvious reading Ready Player One that Wade is an extreme version of the author: Cline has spent his life consumed by the 1980s, so he wrote a book about a heroic teenager who is consumed by the 1980s.  Wikipedia confirms this is correct, but it was obvious even without Wikipedia:

1. There is so much 1980s content that the book would have been way too much effort to write unless the reviewer was already highly familiar with the subject matter.

2. The plot is so weird–the world’s greatest 1980s pop culture aficionado wins $240 billion, really?–that it’s hard to see someone writing this unless they truly love the 1980s.

3. The many 1980s references that are irrelevant to the plot are a tell.  Only a person obsessed with the 1980s would add gratuitous 1980s pop culture references to a novel whose plot already centers on 1980s pop culture references.  These gratuitous references serve a similar function as facial tattoos on a gang member: an inefficient, but nonetheless reliable because it is inefficient, signal of the person’s lifelong devotion to his cause.

OK, so Ready Player One is not only about a character with an unhealthy obsession with the 1980s, but it is also by an author with an unhealthy obsession with the 1980s.  Should we care about this?  Yes, in my view.  The fact that the book’s author is himself an eccentric individual with weird obsessions enhances the book’s artistic significance.

Taking a step back: whether, or under what circumstances, an author’s identity is relevant to a critical assessment of the author’s work is a topic of perpetual debate.  In some cases the author’s identity is, or should be, irrelevant, such as in scientific papers and Astral Codex Ten book review competitions.

But sometimes it matters.  It clearly matters when a person writes a purported non-fiction account of what it was like to be a person with that particular identity.  If the person turns out not to have that identity, then the book is a lie.

The same is true, perhaps to a lesser extent, when we’re talking about fiction with a tie to the real world, in which that real-world component purportedly reflects the author’s own life experiences. In 2004, an author who went by the name “H.G. Carrillo,” and claimed to be a Cuban immigrant, published a well-regarded novel entitled “Loosing my Espanish” about the Cuban immigrant experience.   It was later revealed that the author’s name was actually Herman Glenn Carroll and he had no ties to Cuba.  It seems reasonable to take Loosing my Espanish off of reading lists in view of this revelation.  The novel was supposedly an authentic depiction of the Cuban immigrant experience.  If you care about what it is like to be a Cuban immigrant, you want to hear from an actual Cuban immigrant.

Even when a piece of art has no explicit tie to the real world, sometimes it is interesting because it’s from a member of a cultural group that’s interesting.  Suppose you learned that some uncontacted tribe had been found in the Amazon and had produced some really wild abstract art.  You’d want to see the art, right?  The art would become a lot less interesting if it turned out to have been created using MidJourney.

Ready Player One is artistically significant, at least in part, because it is written by a citizen of a subculture that rarely produces notable works of literature. The Daily Beast reviewer hates Ready Player One because he hates this subculture: “Yet reading Ready Player One, it’s not Wade for whom one feels the most contempt; it’s Cline. … Wade’s boundless, super-radical-amazing ‘80s erudition is really Cline’s, and something the author can’t help but brag about in detail.”  I think Ready Player One should instead be approached with an open mind.  People who are obsessed with a narrow topic, like 1980s pop culture, may be the object of scorn.  But they are people too, worthy of a literary portrayal–and who better to offer that literary portrayal than an author obsessed with that narrow topic?  Rather than mocking the subculture portrayed in Ready Player One, one should explore whether the book sheds light on the subculture in a manner that would be impossible if it was written by an interloper.

So far my argument regarding the significance of the author’s own life experiences might seem circular.  “We can tell, from the volume of 1980s references, that the author is obsessed with the 1980s; wow, people obsessed with the 1980s don’t write many best-selling novels; let’s read this one; you’ll learn that people obsessed with the 1980s write novels about characters who are obsessed with the 1980s!”  But when you dig a little deeper, more intriguing insights emerge.

Ready Player One and the things that matter in life

What really matters in life?  Family and relationships, we are often told.  Wade Watts disagrees.  I don’t know if that makes Wade a hero or an anti-hero, but it makes him an unusual main character, and it makes Ready Player One an interesting book.

Wade’s childhood was miserable.  When Wade was a baby, his father was shot dead while looting a grocery store during a power blackout.  Wade’s mother died of a drug overdose when Wade was 11.  At that point Wade’s Aunt Alice takes him in, not “out of kindness or familial responsibility,” but instead “to get the extra food vouchers from the government every month.”  And Aunt Alice doesn’t even give him the food!  He has to sell old computers to pawnshops to get food.  Meanwhile, Aunt Alice’s boyfriend, Rick, makes Aunt Alice look like Mother Teresa.

After Wade finds the Copper Key, Nolan Sorrento, another gunter and the book’s primary bad guy, decides to murder Wade.  So he blows up the stack where Wade lives, killing Aunt Alice, Rick, and scores of others.  Wade escapes death because he wasn’t in the stack when this occurred.

A normal person would be traumatized by these events, but Wade doesn’t care.  Wade claims to have been upset for a year after being orphaned, but after that, he forgets about his parents: he discusses them in Chapter 1 (of 39), and then never mentions them again.  As for Aunt Alice, he cries one time about her death, observing: “My aunt Alice had never shown me much kindness, but she still hadn’t deserved to die.”  And that’s the last we hear about Aunt Alice.

The book’s treatment of Wade’s family parallels the book’s treatment of Wade’s sexuality.  Most of Ready Player One is devoid of sexual content.   Wade falls in love with a female gunter, Art3mis, but their relationship is mostly transacted in OASIS, and the descriptions of their relationship are chaste.  

But there’s one exception.  Midway through the book is a short passage that describes Wade’s methods of sexual gratification.  Recognizing this is a family blog, I won’t include the details, but it’s a truly vile passage to read.  

In 1973, in the famous case of Miller v. California, the Supreme Court held that a work would be deemed “obscene” only if it does not have “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”  In response to Miller, pornographic filmmakers would throw in some random content of “literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” in an effort to establish that the films were non-obscene under Miller’s test.  For example, the actors might, in flagrante delicto, stop what they were doing and begin reciting the periodic table or the Declaration of Independence.  Ready Player One feels like the inverse of post-Miller pornography: the entire book is child-friendly except for this one, random, disgusting piece of sexual content.  And just as Wade forgets about his family during the rest of the book, he forgets about sex during the rest of the book; he focuses only on video games and gunting.

It would be easy to conclude from all this that Ready Player One is simply a bad book.  What kind of author offers throwaway references to family and sexuality and then forgets about these topics completely?  

Maybe that is the right way of looking at it, but we can be more charitable.  Maybe Wade just … doesn’t care about family and sexuality very much.  Video games, 1980s trivia, and gunting are Wade’s priorities.

If that’s so, then the only faithful way to portray Wade would be … to do exactly what Ready Player One does, pretty much.  If Wade spent page after page introspecting about how he wished he cared about his family but didn’t, this would indicate that Wade does, in fact, care about his family at some level.  This would be contrary to Wade’s true nature, which is that he doesn’t care about his family.  

Well, you ask, maybe this means that Wade is just a superficial, grotesque oaf?

First, even if Wade is a superficial, grotesque oaf, that doesn’t mean that Ready Player One is a bad book.  Villains make literature interesting.  I doubt a single great novel in history has been composed solely of good-guy characters.  Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for his novel The Stranger, in which the main character attended his mother’s funeral, didn’t cry or care, and then murdered a random person because it was sunny.

Second … is Wade that much of a superficial, grotesque oaf?

Wade is both the best 1980s video gamer in the world and the most knowledgeable 1980s pop culture expert in the world.  This goes beyond being Usain Bolt; it’s more like if Usain Bolt and Magnus Carlsen were the same person.  You might laugh at the World #1 at these activities, but I admire anyone who is able to achieve such greatness, even at a frivolous task.  If you admire, e.g., the world’s best shot-putter, why not the world’s best Joust gamer?

But even setting aside Wade’s technical skills, there are a lot of good things about Wade.  In assessing where a character stands on the good/evil scale, I like to use the Seven Deadly Sins:

Pride: Wade isn’t particularly arrogant; even though he’s extremely successful, it’s always an oh-shucks type of success.

Greed: Even though (spoiler alert, but you already knew this) Wade wins the contest, he makes it a point to share his winnings with his sidekicks who helped him get there.

Wrath: Although Wade occasionally loses his cool a little bit, he is remarkably level-headed about the many terrible tragedies that occurred in his life.  Wade’s resilience following the sudden deaths of his mother, father, and aunt is Wade’s most admirable quality.

Envy: Wade had a terrible childhood and is very poor.  Early in the book, because he has so little money, he’s stuck on the boring school planet on OASIS while other, wealthier kids can go wherever they want.  But he’s not envious; he works hard and tries to better himself.

Lust: We’ve talked about this.  Wade is very practical about managing lust and focuses on video games.

Gluttony: After realizing he is spending too much time in OASIS and leading an unhealthy lifestyle, Wade starts to exercise regularly and gets in good shape.

Sloth: Throughout the book, Wade is extremely industrious.  He has to work from a young age to feed himself; he even causes himself to be sold into indentured servitude to advance the plot at one point.

For a superficial, grotesque oaf, Wade ends up coming across pretty well.  Wade is … wait for it … a morally complex character!  Which is exactly what you’d find in an artistically significant work.

It’s not just that Wade is morally complex.  It’s that the book shows us, rather than tells us, that Wade is morally complex.  Unlike many bad novels, there is nothing explicitly didactic about Ready Player One.  Instead, Wade’s moral complexity emerges organically from Ready Player One’s narrative.  By slogging through descriptions of Wade’s obsession with 1980s pop culture, we learn that Wade is an intellectually sophisticated person, at least along one dimension–he’s an expert at the 1980s in the same way as, say, a physicist is an expert on mathematics.  And yet, here’s a guy who is too busy playing video games to care that here’s an orphan.  Simply by telling a story, Ready Player One forces us to grapple with moral ambiguities.

Not only is Wade a morally ambiguous character, but he’s an unusual character.  Moral ambiguity is ubiquitous in novels–we regularly see the alcoholic husband who loves his children but commits adultery, or whatever.  But Wade is morally ambiguous along an unfamiliar dimension.  He’s fanatically obsessed with a narrow topic, while being emotionally flat about the things normal people care about.  Many of us are familiar with people like this in real life, but they are rarely portrayed in literature.  Wade is an extreme caricature of this archetype, which makes him particularly difficult to evaluate, the sign of a good book.

One final point on this.  Circling back to the punch line of the prior section, Ready Player One’s moral complexity becomes more interesting because the author, Cline, is himself consumed with the 1980s.  

One interpretation of Ready Player One is that it’s a book about an extreme nerd, by an extreme nerd.  The depiction of the extreme nerd–so obsessed about 1980s pop culture that he ceases to care about his family, without any judgment from the author–is made authentic by the fact that the author knows, from personal experience, what it is like to be an extreme nerd.  

Also, as noted above, Ready Player One is a book that couldn’t have been written by a non-nerd.  So we have a book that is written by an author from a particular subculture, about a character from that subculture, who is morally complex because he comes from that subculture.  To me, as lowbrow as Ready Player One may seem, that is a sign of artistic significance.

Ready Player One hides evil in plain sight

James Halliday–the creator of OASIS and the $240 billion contest–is evil.

Well, evil might be too strong.  Nolan Sorrento, who murders everyone in Wade’s stack so as to improve his gunting odds, is evil.  James Halliday might better be described as the least effective altruist of all time.

To review, Halliday decides to award $240 billion to the person who has the greatest skill at solving obscure puzzles related to 1980s pop culture.  Also, we learn late in the book that Halliday also hands over total control of OASIS–which, effectively, means total control of the Internet–to the winner of this contest.  This includes the power to shut down OASIS completely.  This is a horrible way of deciding who gets his money, and an even more horrible way of deciding who controls the Internet.

Let’s start with the money.  It is low-hanging fruit to observe that, in a world of chaos and destruction, there are better things to do with $240 billion than to award it to the person who is best at playing 1980s video games and memorizing 1980s movies.  Why not award the prize to the person who solves the catastrophic climate change problem?  Or maybe create 100 $2.4 billion prizes, each of which goes to someone who solves a different aspect of the world’s troubles?  Instead, you are incentivizing thousands, perhaps millions of people to do the exact opposite of what you’d want them to do to get the world back on track, which is memorize obscure pop culture while surfing OASIS.  And by awarding all of the money to the winner, you are condemning all other competitors to years of wasted time and useless knowledge.

Also, even assuming there was some world in which it would make sense for Halliday to award his fortune to a person with expertise in video games and movies, it shouldn’t be these video games and movies.  Here’s a YouTube video of Joust, which Wade must master to get the Copper Key.  It is a horrible game.  The graphics are horrible, the sound is horrible, the gameplay is horrible.  I don’t blame the game designers; computers in 1982 were extremely primitive and the designers did the best they could. Computers today are several orders of magnitude better, so video games are several orders of magnitude better.  Why condemn people to developing expertise in bad video games?

The same is true for the other cultural outputs of the 1980s that gunters must master.  There are some nerdy movies from the 1980s that are pretty good: movies like WarGames and Bladerunner have held up reasonably well, although the visuals in modern sci-fi movies are dramatically better.  Still, for sci-fi lovers, the marginal utility of watching films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), The Matrix (1999), Inception (2010), and Interstellar (2014) for the first time is dramatically higher than the marginal utility of watching Bladerunner for the 100th time.  Also, watching movies dated both before and after the 1980s adds richness to the movies from the 1980s–the viewer can understand the 1980s films in their historical context.  It’s incredibly depressing that Wade–an immensely intelligent and talented person–squanders so many of his neurons on mastering this extremely narrow subject.  (Wade became obsessed with the 1980s before the contest was announced, because he’s just a weird person, but there are plenty of Wades out there who presumably started studying up on the 1980s when they learned that $240 billion was at stake).

Ready Player One explains that Halliday loves the 1980s because it brings back memories of his childhood, and he wants other people to love the things he loves.  And, sure, when I encounter video games from my childhood, I also get emotional.  But that’s because the games cause old memories to flood back.  If they didn’t cause old memories to flood back, then it would make no sense to play them–objectively, the games are bad compared to today’s games.  Why should people be incentivized to play 1982 video games in 2045?

Halliday also gives complete control over the Internet, including the power to shut down the Internet, to the gunter who finds the easter egg.   This is indefensible.  One person should not control the Internet.  Can we agree with that?  One person should not control the Internet.  

Even if control over the Internet should be vested in one person, that person should not be the prevailing gunter. Anyone who wins the contest has devoted his life to mastering old video games and memorizing old movies.  These skills do not translate well into the type of management skills needed to be the dictator of the Internet.  Also, the type of person who is obsessive enough to master these extremely niche skills might not be the right person to be the most powerful person on Earth.  Wade is 18 years old.  He is very talented, but he lacks the skill or judgment to control the Internet.

The interesting, and artistically significant, thing about Ready Player One is that it’s easy to overlook how awful Halliday is.

Ready Player One centers on Wade.  It’s easy to root for Wade.  He’s a good kid.  He’s overcome a lot in his life, he’s extremely talented, and he’s brave.  

Wade admires Halliday.  And for good reason: Wade’s obsessions match Halliday’s obsessions.  And so, the reader, who likes Wade, starts to like Halliday, too.

Nonfiction lovers sometimes ask … what’s the point of a philosophical novel?  If you’d like to convey a philosophical idea, why not just say it?  Why weave it into a story?  The conventional answer is that humans are wired to learn things by hearing stories, and sometimes a story can convey an idea that a nonfiction book cannot.

Ready Player One makes that idea concrete.  A central problem we all confront is … why do people admire evildoers?  How could villains gain large followings?  Ready Player One teaches that idea through its story.  We read a book that’s focused on Wade’s perspective and largely ignores the disastrous conditions outside of OASIS.  We have fun reading about Wade’s exploits, we begin rooting for Wade, and so we begin rooting for Wade’s idol, Halliday.  This teaches a lesson: focusing on a particular person’s parochial perspective, and ignoring the wider picture, can distort people’s judgment and cause them to admire people who shouldn’t be admired.  

This is an idea that can be told in the abstract in a nonfiction book, but reading Ready Player One causes the reader to feel it.  After reading Ready Player One I found myself thinking Halliday was a cool guy, which is disturbing.  The ability to convey ideas through narrative is a hallmark of artistic significance.

Ready Player One: a political novel

One of the crucial plot twists in Ready Player One concerns the character known as “Aech” (i.e., the letter H).  Early in the book, Wade and Aech meet in OASIS and become best friends, brought together by their common obsession with 1980s pop culture and gunting.  Even though they’ve only met each other online, Aech’s OASIS avatar is a white male, so Wade assumes that Aech is an actual white male.  About 300 pages into the book, it becomes necessary for Wade and Aech to meet IRL.  The book then offers a stunning reveal regarding Aech’s true identity:

“A heavyset African American girl sat in the RV’s driver seat, clutching the wheel tightly and staring straight ahead.  She was about my age, with short, kinky hair and chocolate-colored skin that appeared iridescent in the soft glow of the dashboard indicators.”

Initially, Wade is shocked and betrayed that Aech is a Black woman:

“A wave of emotion washed over me.  Shock gave way to a sense of betrayal.  How could he—she—deceive me all these years?  I felt my face flush with embarrassment as I remembered all the adolescent intimacies I’d shared with Aech.  A person I’d trusted implicitly.  Someone I thought I knew.”

Wade stammers to Aech that he “never imagined” that “the famous Aech, renowned gunter and the most feared and ruthless arena combatant in the entire OASIS was, in reality, a ….”  Aech finishes his sentence: “A fat black chick?”

The next page, Ready Player One discloses that Aech is not only fat and Black, but also a lesbian.  Wade’s reaction:  “I wasn’t all that surprised, really.  Over the past few years, Aech and I had discussed our mutual admiration for the female form on numerous occasions.”  We are even told that Wade is “relieved” to learn that Aech is a lesbian.

Aech explains that she used a white male avatar to avoid race and sex discrimination in OASIS.  Wade forgives Aech:

“I understood her, trusted her, and loved her as a dear friend.  None of that had changed, or could be changed by anything as inconsequential as her gender, or skin color, or sexual orientation.”

And that is that!  A few pages later, Aech shifts back to male pronouns: “Even though I now knew Aech was actually a female in real life, her avatar was still male, so I decided to continue to refer to him as such.”  Aech’s race, sexual orientation, and body type are never again mentioned in the book.  

O-K.  To discuss this spicy plot twist, let’s hear what our pundits, Bob Based and Wanda Woke, have to say.

Bob:  This part of the book is pathetic.  It’s everything that’s wrong with America today.

Wanda:  Yeah.  I agree.  America is the pits.

Bob: Wait a second.  We agree on something?  I thought we never agree on anything.  My entire political philosophy is premised on spending every waking hour hating you.

Wanda: Yes, that is weird.  Wait a second … why do you hate it?

Bob:  Is diversity really necessary in Ready Player One?  Not just diversity but someone who ticks off every intersectional box: Black AND woman AND LGBT AND overweight.  Let’s be realistic, 99% of the dorks who obsess with 1980s culture and love 1980s video games are dorky males.  Randomly throwing a Black lesbian into the book is woke madness.  

Wanda: Isn’t that an insanely racist, sexist, and homophobic thing to say?  I thought your mantra was that anti-wokeness was premised on opposition to woke ideas.  But Aech never expresses any ideas that you disagree with.  She loves 1980s video games and pop culture, just like Wade.  You’re merely offended that a Black LGBT woman exists in the book.  Your comment simply proves that “anti-wokeness” means nothing more than “discomfort with non-straight white males in straight white male spaces.”

Bob: Hardly.  If a Black lesbian wants to play 1980s video games or obsess over 1980s pop culture, she can be my guest.   The problem is that Aech is a pure token.  It’s like, “OK!  We’ll diversify Ready Player One!  Hooray, we’re great people!”  And then the book forgets all about it.  It’s completely unnecessary other than as a kind of loyalty oath to the DEI movement.

Wanda:  Would you have preferred the book if it spent 30 pages discussing Aech’s experiences with racism, misogyny, and homophobia?   Authors are damned if they do, damned if they don’t.  If they focus on a character’s race, sex, and sexual orientation, you’d call the book woke and boring.  If they address a character’s race, sex, and sexual orientation only in passing, you say that the book is woke because the character is a “token.” Seems to me that the only book you’re willing to tolerate is a book with only white male characters.

Bob:  It’s ok if there aren’t any minority characters in a book!  If an author wants to write a book that organically includes a multiracial cast of characters, that is fine.  But Aech doesn’t fit into Ready Player One.  The only reason she’s there is that the author felt the book needed to be diverse for the sake of being diverse, and that philosophy is what I’m opposed to.  It’s exactly like how Gemini insisted on diversifying 14th-century Popes before being taken offline.  

Wanda:  Maybe the book just wanted to introduce a character who acts contrary to stereotypes.  What’s wrong with that?  Novels would be pretty boring, not to mention unrealistic, if all characters conformed to stereotypes.   Or maybe it’s just Black and LGBT characters who you think should be portrayed as racist and homophobic caricatures?  You’d be cool if a white computer scientist portrayed in a book turned out to be a great athlete, but if the book portrayed a brilliant Black mathematician, suddenly it’s “woke”?

Bob:  If I was uncomfortable with a book portraying a brilliant Black mathematician, fine, perhaps that would be racist.  But fundamentally, Aech and Wade are pathetic.  They spend all day playing horrible video games and watching dumb movies.  OK, they live in a weird fantasy world in which this skill might yield a $240 billion jackpot, but it’s still a pathetic lifestyle, and Aech doesn’t even win!  Are we really dismantling racism and homophobia by diversifying the category of “fictional characters who obsessively play bad video games and memorize bad movies?”

Wanda: Well, we can agree on one thing: Ready Player One doesn’t dismantle racism and homophobia.  I hate Ready Player One, too.

Bob: And why is that?

Wanda: Because Ready Player One centers white straight maleness more than any other book I have ever read.  The sole purpose of Aech being Black is so the book can show how wonderful Wade is for tolerating her being Black.  The sole purpose of her being a lesbian is so Wade–and readers–can relate to her for also liking chicks.  The sole purpose of her being overweight is so the reader thinks: “whoa, she’s overweight too?  And Wade likes her anyway?  What a hero!”  Her very identity exists merely to burnish the credentials of a white male.

Bob: Would you have preferred her not being in the book at all?  Or do you think all novels need to have detailed character studies of Black lesbians in order to not be racist and homophobic?

Wanda: I am not suggesting that all novels must have detailed character studies of Black lesbians.  I am saying that this particular character is offensive.  That said, in a book portraying American society in 2045, I think it would be very weird not to have any racial minority or LGBT characters.  There are, and there will be in 2045, millions of racial minorities and millions of LGBT people in America.  If a book makes them all disappear, it is probably a bad book.

Bob: OK, so how would you have written Ready Player One in a non-offensive way without transforming it into a detailed character study of a Black lesbian?

Wanda:  How about letting Aech be Aech, rather than portraying her as a white male for all but two pages?  For the first 300 pages, Aech is portrayed as a cool white male who acts exactly like Wade.  Then we have two pages where she’s a Black lesbian.  Then she’s transformed back into the white male avatar, with the book even using male pronouns, but hooray, Wade is now on a pedestal for accepting her.  Only a white male could possibly portray a Black woman this way.  Why is the author scared of having a Black woman be a Black woman?

Bob:  The book explains that Aech hid her identity because she was worried about discrimination in OASIS if she portrayed herself as a Black woman.  And it seems pretty intuitive that groups of white male computer nerds would discriminate against a Black woman.  Would you prefer if the book sent the message of “racial discrimination doesn’t exist in white male spaces”?

Norm: Guys, guys.  You’re both overthinking this.

Bob: Who are you?

Norm: I’m Norm the Normie.  Isn’t Ready Player One a beautiful story about race relations, that both of you should love?  Bob, you should love Ready Player One because it portrays the book’s hero, Wade, as colorblind.  I thought you loved colorblindness!  Wanda, you should love Ready Player One because it presents a powerful, brilliant Black woman character who doesn’t shy away from saying that she’s been the victim of discrimination.  Rather than arguing, shouldn’t we all come together and be inspired by Ready Player One’s message of racial harmony?  And isn’t it fascinating that the one author who is capable of producing this inspiring piece of work product is a weird nerd?  

Wanda:  You cannot be serious.  Ready Player One introduces a character that both Bob and I agree is artificial and ridiculous, and you’re saying that’s the path to racial reconciliation?

Bob:  Just because a book takes a kind of middle ground, doesn’t mean it’s a good book.  You know the controversies about Confederate monuments?  Some people want to take them down because they portray racist villains, some people want to keep them up for tradition’s sake.  Suppose someone offered the compromise of tearing down the monuments and replacing them with new, smaller monuments.  This would be worse than both options, right?  You are still honoring the racist villains and you can’t even justify it anymore by saying you’re honoring tradition.  Ready Player One is the same way.  It introduces a Black woman character as a way of pledging fealty to the wokeness movement, and then makes her a pure token.  It’s the worst of both worlds!

Let’s cut this discussion off.  Maybe you think I’m the ridiculous one for treating Ready Player One as some kind of politically charged novel.

Actually, though, Ready Player One did become a politically charged novel.

In the mid-2010s, there was a … thing … called Gamergate.  I am not going to try to explain Gamergate.  Actually, I don’t even understand Gamergate.  Some people on the Internet started harassing and doxxing other people because they felt there was too much diversity in video games, and because a journalist allegedly had a relationship with a video game developer and … OK, I am going to stop trying to explain Gamergate.

In the wake of Gamergate, there started to be a backlash against Ready Player One.  The theory was that it glorified the type of toxic white maleness that the Gamergate villains also glorified.  Here’s an excerpt of Vox on “The Ready Player One Backlash, explained.”

The world of Cline’s escapist fantasy is a world of elitist gatekeeping. It is a world in which a person’s value is determined by their knowledge of esoteric cultural trivia, where those of lesser value must be defeated and wiped away, and where gaming is all that matters. And, crucially, it is a world specifically for straight white men.

Do I agree with this critique?  And do I agree with Wanda, Bob, or Norm?  To me this is like asking whether the dog has the Buddha-nature.  There is no answer.

Instead, the more interesting question to me is, does the fact that Ready Player One became a politically charged novel mean that it’s an artistically significant book?  

The property of “capable of provoking political discussion” is sometimes, but not always, a sign of artistic significance.  Sometimes a book’s ability to provoke political discussion is endogenous to the book, that is, the book is well-crafted and multi-layered, rendering it capable of provoking interesting discussion.  Sometimes it’s exogenous to the book–the book because a cultural flashpoint for reasons unrelated to the book’s merits.

In the case of Ready Player One, it’s a mix of both, but it’s mostly endogenous.  The book is highly well-crafted along one dimension: it demonstrates a virtuoso’s mastery of 1980s pop culture.  As already mentioned, very few people could have written this book.  And because it glorifies Wade so extravagantly and comprehensively, it engenders debate about whether books should glorify white male nerddom.  Maybe the author didn’t realize the book would engender this debate when he wrote it, but that’s a common feature of artistically significant works.  The author’s skill was a prerequisite to the book’s political significance, and that’s another reason Ready Player One is worth studying.