79 replies to this topic

[Happy Ent]

That is all spot on, ’palm.

[Datepalm]

....but...but...splutter...why does everyone like it?

[Sci-2]

Because the book is itself, in terms of style, a throwback to an earlier era?

[williamjm]

Datepalm, on 27 December 2011 - 03:17 AM, said:

This bugged me too, thematically as well as logically. Not only is it not a hard quest, its not an interesting one either. A quest is supposed to consist of, well, cool, adventurous character building stuff - arduous treks up forbidding mountains, deadly duels with worthy enemies, daring rescues of attractive women, that sort of business. Here they just...geek out some more. Not only, imo, is the actual contents of the quest objectively boring (I think the, erm, quarter dropped when he played pacman for 6 hours or whatever it was. Thats awful) but they're not new to the characters.

I think Halliday could have been more creative with his challenges (even before you consider that he basically repeated some challenges with different games and movies), and I think he could have required more creativity from his challengers. The simplest way to do that would be to have a challenge based on something Halliday liked from the time period but didn't mention in his Almanac, so people who were slavishly copying his obsessions wouldn't have prepared for it but someone with a genuine love of the 80s (which is what Halliday claimed to be looking for) would know about anyway, because they wanted to. A more complicated variation would be to make up his own brand new game using 80s tropes and have them have to beat that, it would at least be a little bit more meaningful than beating Zork because you've memorised the entire game.

[Happy Ent]

williamjm, on 27 December 2011 - 08:01 PM, said:

A more complicated variation would be to make up his own brand new game using 80s tropes and have them have to beat that, it would at least be a little bit more meaningful than beating Zork because you've memorised the entire game.

But, but, … the pleasant thing about RP1 is exactly that I have (if not memorised then at least) sufficient recollection of Zork that I remember exactly what to do. That gives me a pleasant felling of deja vu.

I understand ’palm’s criticism and suggestions for improvement, but it’s like suggesting an improvement to the plot of a porn movie. “Three Beeches do Mirkwood” might have improved by a stronger focus on the girls’s interpersonal relationships, and the scene with the kraken could have been slightly better foreshadowed, but that misses the point of the production. It’s valid but irrelevant.

Edited by Happy Ent, 28 December 2011 - 03:52 AM.

[Datepalm]

So you're saying the pleasure of RP1 derives from it's objective, undemanding, pornographic crapness?

[williamjm]

Quote

But, but, … the pleasant thing about RP1 is exactly that I have (if not memorised then at least) sufficient recollection of Zork that I remember exactly what to do. That gives me a pleasant felling of deja vu.

I suspect you'd probably still get some deja vu (although obviously not as much) from playing a Zork-style text adventure you'd never played, especially if it was set in the same world and had references to the original Zork games, even if it wasn't a precise replica of the original Zork.

[Datepalm]

sciborg2, on 27 December 2011 - 05:56 PM, said:

Because the book is itself, in terms of style, a throwback to an earlier era?

I've been wondering what you mean by this...

I can see the argument for it kind of encompassing two prominent 80's literary trends: naive coming-of-age quest fantasy and cyberpunk. But I can't see thats it's stylistically actually much like what i've read of either. (I looked through the list of every book published in the 80's i've ever read according to Goodreads.) The best case I can make is that theres some nod given to a slow start, to those first chapters of a characters normal, pre adventure life that seems to have fallen somewhat by the wayside since the days of Eddings et al. in favour of starting the story right in the middle of a battle or using more complicated narrative structures, but its got nothing of the immersive heft of that kind of writing in the original. In other ways, the chattery, jargony, thin first person narration strikes me as very contemporary in style.

I realize this is hopelessly subjective, of course, but I do wonder, what did you mean here?

[Sci-2]

Datepalm, on 28 December 2011 - 12:58 PM, said:

I've been wondering what you mean by this...

I can see the argument for it kind of encompassing two prominent 80's literary trends: naive coming-of-age quest fantasy and cyberpunk. But I can't see thats it's stylistically actually much like what i've read of either. (I looked through the list of every book published in the 80's i've ever read according to Goodreads.) The best case I can make is that theres some nod given to a slow start, to those first chapters of a characters normal, pre adventure life that seems to have fallen somewhat by the wayside since the days of Eddings et al. in favour of starting the story right in the middle of a battle or using more complicated narrative structures, but its got nothing of the immersive heft of that kind of writing in the original. In other ways, the chattery, jargony, thin first person narration strikes me as very contemporary in style.

I realize this is hopelessly subjective, of course, but I do wonder, what did you mean here?

Heh I think you may have given a more thoughtful analysis than I did for the book. I just mean that the book is very similar to the idea of an awkward chosen one, evil corporate bad guys motivated by greed, and so on. I do agree with you that rather than trivial knowledge, the narrative should have rewarded actual skills more. (Mind you I'm only partway through I just don't care about spoilers for most books)

But I sort of equate it to ancient sorcerers defeated by the power of love or some such. The power, in this case trivia knowledge, is based on the main character's faith and hope more than anything.

[Spaßvogel]

Just finished this book.  It was OKAY, but didn't give me tinglies or anything.  A few bits made me smile.  I think the major problem I had was that there were long sections of exposition that explained many of the references, so that anyone who grew up in the 80s was forced to read a bunch of informaiton they already knew.

There was a lot of the author present (literally in some aspects) in the work, and the things I knew about him (from his work on Fanboys) actually subtracted from the novel a bit--made it too pat or something.  There was nothing in the main character's "character" that made him uniquely able to complete the quest other than just being a major fanboy.  This book seems to glorify the fanboy, it's the ultimate fanwank novel.

The villains are cardboard thin, the "real world" is barely there, the friendships didn't feel all that real--it's a brilliant idea executed less than perfectly.

And the original poster said something about Wade's school credits being zero and then he was suddenly able to graduate... I think you're confusing two kinds of credits.  He was talking about OASIS money credits as being zero, not his school class credits (of which he already had enough to graduate).

[aryasthebomb]

Has anyone else read this? I just finished it and
Thought it was amazing. I was geeking out the whole time
And i swear there was times where it felt like this was written for me personally
Anyone else read it? Thoughts? If there is already a topic on this sorry, i looked and didnt see one.

[williamjm]

There was a threadon this before.

[Datepalm]

bounce

[thistlepong]

Happy Ent, on 28 December 2011 - 03:52 AM, said:

But, but, … the pleasant thing about RP1 is exactly that I have (if not memorised then at least) sufficient recollection of Zork that I remember exactly what to do. That gives me a pleasant felling of deja vu.

Datepalm, on 28 December 2011 - 04:09 AM, said:

So you're saying the pleasure of RP1 derives from it's objective, undemanding, pornographic crapness?

aryasthebomb, on 09 May 2012 - 11:55 AM, said:

Has anyone else read this? I just finished it and
Thought it was amazing. I was geeking out the whole time
And i swear there was times where it felt like this was written for me personally

I think that sums up my feelings about the book.  I wouldn't recommend it to folks without the background to appreciate it, but I immediately told six or seven friends to drop what they were reading.  No pangs of conscience either as it's a one or two day read.  And the audiobook's read by Wil Wheaton, which is itself sort of pandering.

It's a great and terrible book, which makes it sound more profound than it is.  I can't really separate the clunky narrative, the monotonous listing, and the cliches from the recognition of the first puzzle, the Atari trivia, and the vicarious pleasure of hardware upgrades.

Anyway, I can explain why I liked it by analogy.  I just looked up the readyplayerone page and saw READY PLAYER ONE DREAM CAST and gasped a little, then frowned when I realized it was soliciting actors rather than announcing a port for the Sega Dreamcast.

[Balefont]

Datepalm, on 27 December 2011 - 05:10 PM, said:

....but...but...splutter...why does everyone like it?

Doesn't the main character have Asperger's?  That would completely explain his obsessive devotion to learning what others may deem as mundane facts about unimportant stuff.

[Blaine]

Just got around to reading this over my vacation. And weirdly I agree with both of the usual two opinions I've heard about it.

1. This book was insanely fun to read. Like so much fun that I wished it were three times as long. So much fun that I found myself fanboying out over which 80s geek references were used. So much fun that I didn't mind all of the things that could have been so much better about the writing itself, or the challenges, or the characters (see Point 2). So much fun that I didn't even finish the third chapter before berating all my nerd friends to buy it immediately and start reading it so we could talk about it.

2. This book is not deep. Like not hardly at all. The world is a brilliantly fun idea, but it's ridiculously unrealistic at the same time. The characters are remarkably thin, the challenges are far too easy, and we're ushered through them far too quickly for anyone to care too much about them. For a book about the "real world" and a virtual world, the real world didn't hold up, thus making the whole thing a bit hard to believe in. Tons of Deus Ex, Garry Stu, Manic Pixie Dream Girls and a million other cliches abound.

But ultimately none of the point #2 problems kept me from enjoying it. Because of point #1. RP1 was simply too much fun for me to care that much about its inadequacies.

I'd love to see Cline's next novel take this kind of fun ride and great concept and then slow it down, add some meat, and see how it turns out. My guess is that it could be even better.

[Werthead]

My take:

Quote

2044. The climate is wrecked, oil resources have been depleted and the world economy has still not fully recovered from the excesses of the turn of the century. Wade Watts, like millions of other teenagers, escapes the real world by playing in the OASIS, a computer programme that has combined the old Internet and numerous MMORPGs into a virtual reality existence. Five years ago the founder of the OASIS died, leaving his multi-billion-dollar fortune to whoever can solve an elaborate puzzle he left behind in the game. Millions have tried and failed...until Wade stumbles across a key clue. Suddenly a race is on: Wade and several fellow gamers competing with one another and a sinister corporation to be the first to win the prize.

Ready Player One is the debut novel by writer Ernest Cline, whose previous genre credit of note was co-writing the 2009 movie Fanboys. Ready Player One, like that movie, is a geek-centric, nostalgia-heavy paean for the past. In this case, Cline references early video games, 'classic' movies of the 1980s and various TV shows and bands as he creates a cultural landscape which Wade must delve into to solve the puzzles left for him and millions of fellow gamers.

The book is mostly set within the OASIS, with the world outside described fairly perfunctorily. There are allusions to ecological catastrophe, peak oil, climate change and the breakdown of society, but these elements are not developed very far at all. Within the OASIS things are more engaging, with Cline creating worlds dedicated entirely to 1980s video games or to fantastical environments where the rules of nature are twisted. It's basically Second Life meets Tad Williams's Otherworld with a dash of EVE Online and World of WarCraft on top and is described vividly and energetically. However, the creations are usually built on cultural references with Cline contributing little that is original.

This is Ready Player One's key weakness. The book is a nostalgia-fest, a romp through 1980s video arcades, ancient home consoles, old-skool Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and repeated viewings of movies like Ladyhawke and WarGames. For those who get the references, it's great fun. For those who don't, the book struggles a little. Being born seven years after Cline (and the creator of the OASIS in the book), I got a lot of the references but others, particularly to the very earliest days of home gaming, were unfamiliar. Cline, to his credit, does try to explain each reference in as concise a manner as possible, but this has a tendency to slow down the narrative whilst not necessarily helping very much (my visual imagining of Joust was very different to the reality of the game when I finally looked it up online).

The characters are straightforward archetypes, veering very little away from the standard. Main character Wade is an awkward, non-confident nerd living with an unsympathetic extended family and being irrationally blamed for their misfortunes (when we get a glimpse of Wade's home life I was half-expecting him to be sleeping a small cupboard, Potter-style). Cline shows a rare burst of imagination in suggesting that in the future, trailer parks will be overcrowded to the point of having trailers stacked on top of one another with supporting framework and these will sometimes collapse, to no-one's particular interest. The other characters are likewise standard: Art3mis is the cute-but-determined geek girl, Aech is the loyal best friend and two supporting Japanese characters are awesome with swords and much-concerned with honour, which is an unfortunate stereotype. There are a few surprises given that we only know these characters through their online avatars and their 'true' selves turn out to be rather different, but again there are few real surprises here. The villains are, well, snarling caricatures of evil whose motivations are unconvincing and whose chief representative, Sorrento, is a laughable cartoon character at best.

So, we have a book which contributes little of its own to the genre, competently-executed protagonists and awful antagonists. Normally this would be enough to consign a book to the mediocre pile, but Ready Player One still manages to rise above this. Cline's narrative has pace, verve and energy. His ideas are standard but they are handled well, and some of Wade's less laudable activities raise issues about how healthy it is to live your life online or in computer games. Cline is celebrating nostalgia but certainly not advocating dedicating your life to it. The determination of some characters to 'change the world' with the prize money whilst others dream of building a spaceship and escaping also opens an interesting debate about maturity and dealing with consequences rather than running away from them.

Plus, the book is so much damned fun. There's spaceship and mecha fights within the OASIS, antimatter bombings, a puzzle based around the D&D module Tomb of Horrors, a 3D recreation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and laughs than you can shake a stick at. At one point, as he ascends the levels and achievements of the game, Wade chooses as his vehicle the DeLorean from Back to the Future with a Knight Rider-style front grill and Ghostbusters logos on the side. Whether you find that amusing, eye-rollingly inane or merely unimportant will determine how likely you are to enjoy the whole book, but certainly, as a child of the 1980s, I found it fairly entertaining.

Ready Player One (***½) makes up for deficiencies in characterisation and originality with its fast-moving plot and engaging cultural references. The novel is available now in the UK and USA. A film version is in development.

[Cuellar]

Bump from ages ago, but I just finished it up. I thought it was a great book.  Obviously it is not epic fantasy or epic SF, but the story was engaging enough for me because I fit the "ideal reader". It made me nostalgic for my gaming days when I really was a hardcore gamer with great online friendships.  The book did explore the interesting side of online gaming from the standpoint of how "clans" have goals and come together, how people can become great friends "online only", and also how escapism impacts the online gaming community.

The idea of education in an online virtual world is pretty interesting (especially exploring during classes and reduced cost of living).  There are other plot holes that for sure, but still an interesting book.

[drawkcabi]

I loved the book. I agree it wasn't deep, but for someone born in 1975, actually had several cabinet arcade games including Joust and Pacman at my parents' pizza place and a jukebox too. If the writing was shallow the glory of the nostalgia went way deep.

The characters in Oasis being able to secure vehicles from sci-fi movies/shows/books etc, had me I would so have Roy Fokker's Skull 1 veritech/valkyrie as my main fighter in Oasis and probably the Defiant from ST:DS9 as my home base ship - and also the BTTF DeLorean with hover-conversion for planet cruising. It was cool that the main character had Serenity from Firefly but it started out as a ship with no firepower whatsoever and needed to be retrofitted significantly for any kind of battle.

If Halliday really wanted to challenge an 80'sphile he would have had one of the movies be Rad (glances at avatar ) Not as well known but oozing 80's goodness and fun, plus a challenging bike race.

But I just LOVED the book.

[Cuellar]

One interesting thing as a gamer in my opinion how the main adventurers can get from L1 (or 52) to L99 in less than a year. If Oasis had been out for 5+ years, you'd see millions of L99 characters. The fact that they kicked ass (as in the last battle or the club scene before Og acts), while everyone else sucked was a little surprising.   Even games like Everquest had maxed out level characters coming out the wazoo, and if everything is based on time, even a casual gamer can drop 2000 hours on level in 5 years. If it requires more time than that to hit max level, Percy never could have done it.

I just read that the author sold the rights to a new book/scrip "Armada", and got a $1M advance.
http://www.variety.c...e/VR1118063116/