Ready Player Two

Ready Player One was a 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, which became a brief nerd culture sensation before most people decided it was actually bad. I thought it was bad the first time I read it, although on subsequent attempts to revisit it I realized it’s actually far worse than I remembered; the plot in the first half is actually pretty exciting, which masks the poor writing and annoying retro pop culture references on an initial read.

A few years later Ernest Cline wrote Armada, which everyone hated, and then he vanished for a while until the Steven Spielberg movie adaptation of Ready Player One came out and was fairly popular. I can’t prove that Ready Player Two was knocked out in a hurry to capitalize on the movie’s release, but I’m going to argue that that was probably the case.

Ready Player One took place in a fanciful vision of the year 2045, when the United States is collapsing into poverty and decay while monolithic technology corporations profit off of people’s misery via unethical labour practices. The part that’s science fiction is that people find solace in the OASIS, an advanced virtual reality environment that it seems like we’ll actually get to in real life long before 2045 (consumer VR made a lot of rapid leaps in sophistication after the book came out).

The story kicks off via a challenge issued posthumously by the OASIS’ inventor, James Halliday, that will grant ownership of his company and inexhaustible fortune to whoever can locate and solve three puzzles within the OASIS. Since Halliday is a huge dork, these all revolve around 80s nostalgia; the easter egg hunters immerse themselves in the media of that time period in order to have a better shot at solving the puzzles, and this leads to people in 2045 obsessing over retro pop culture and essentially having no culture of their own. Eventually our protagonist Wade Watts and three other egg hunters team up to win the prize before an evil tech corporation can, and the book ends with them taking joint ownership of Halliday’s company and deciding--for no real reason--that they’re done with VR and the real world is where it’s at. 

In order to fully immerse my readers in the experience of trying to read Ready Player Two (much as you might be immersed in a VR world that might kill you if you spend too long using it, just to randomly make a comparison for no reason at all), it’s necessary for me to take an in-depth look at its opening chapters. Partially this is because the book actually improves quite a bit after this point, but mainly it’s because the opening chapters contain all of the flaws that will be present going forward, just in a more concentrated form.

Ready Player Two starts nine days after the last book ended. Wade logs back on to the OASIS (the whole “we’re leaving the virtual world behind” thing gets jettisoned without explanation) and immediately discovers a new posthumous riddle left for him by Halliday.

When I say that Wade finds the riddle immediately, I mean immediately. This entire chapter, which is really an extended prologue, takes place in a breathless rush, as though Ernest Cline was just trying to slam the book out as fast as possible. Almost as if he wanted to take advantage of an unexpected pop culture phenomenon that he and/or his publisher knew wouldn’t last long.

The result is like reading a skeletal first draft. Wade rushes off to one of the company vaults to follow Halliday’s clue, narrating in a breathless string of “I did this, then I did this, and then I did this” statements that are so sparse they’d resemble a Cormac McCarthy novel if they had less punctuation. I know I just complained about a book being too slow in its opening chapters, but there’s such a thing as going too fast as well.

He gets to the vault, and we discover that the first book’s annoying tendency to have Wade laboriously explain every pop culture reference is back in full force. Hey fellow kids, have you heard about this fresh new “42” meme? Did you know it’s a reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, the popular sci-fi novel by Douglas Adams? You did know that, because you’re the kind of person who’d buy a novel called “Ready Player Two” so of course you did? Well our boy Wade’s still going to make damn sure!

What’s weird about this is that the book does sometimes bring up more obscure references without explaining them; at one point Wade’s girlfriend mentions Sword Art Online in the same sentence as The Matrix, even though The Matrix is orders of magnitude more well known.

(This isn’t a criticism, because it would have been unavoidable given the time gap between books, but it’s kind of surreal seeing the characters reference things that either didn’t exist at the time of Ready Player One’s publication, or hadn’t become widely known in the west, as though they’ve always been around).

In the vault, Wade finds a prototype for a next generation OASIS device called the OASIS Neural Interface, or ONI, which is a nice use of nested acronyms. Here’s what it does:

“It is the world’s first fully functional noninvasive brain-computer interface. It allows an OASIS user to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel their avatar’s virtual environment, via signals transmitted directly into their cerebral cortex. The headset’s sensor array also monitors and interprets its wearer’s brain activity, allowing them to control their OASIS avatar just as they do their physical body—simply by thinking about it.”

This brought me up short, because the OASIS tech in the first book is treated like full-immersion virtual reality already. I know it’s supposed to be a combination of VR goggles, body tracking and optional doodads like haptic feedback suits, but that’s not how it’s described. Among other things, if the characters are supposed to be moving their physical bodies whenever they’re doing anything in the OASIS then a lot of the action as described in the first book doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

But the ONI is real full immersion, utterly indistinguishable from reality. Check out these evocative, immersive descriptions:

I could feel my feet resting on the stone floor, snug inside the boots that my avatar was wearing.

I realized I could smell my surroundings too. I breathed in the musty scent of the ancient spell books that lined the walls, mingled with the smoke of the burning candles.

[...]

I was awestruck by the perfect replication of all that interlinked sensory input. These were subtle, nuanced sensations that could never be re-created or simulated by a pair of haptic gloves.

I raised the apple to my avatar’s lips, which now felt like my own lips, and bit into it with what felt like my own teeth. It tasted like a real apple. The most perfectly ripe and delicious apple I’d ever eaten.

It’s like I’m in the OASIS as well!

The ONI can also let users record and upload sensory data so that other people can experience it like a full-immersion video. This is actually a neat idea, and the book astutely notes that it would be more revolutionary than even the virtual reality stuff (Ernest Cline, for all his faults as a writer, can be a pretty good futurist when he’s not letting the nostalgia geek-out get the better of him; the first book predicted the rise of Twitch streaming, Youtube celebrities and even Vtubers pretty accurately).

And it can also damage your brain.

Tampering with or disabling your ONI headset’s built-in security safeguards to exceed the daily usage limits can result in Synaptic Overload Syndrome and permanent neural tissue trauma. Gregarious Simulation Systems will not be held responsible for any injuries caused by improper use of the OASIS Neural Interface.

Aside from the question of why it would do this--it’s described as a combination of existing brain-imaging and neural interface technology, none of which can cause brain damage--it’s worth asking how a device with this sort of risk would ever make it to market. Later, when Wade and his three co-owners are debating whether to mass produce and sell the ONI or not (Halliday left the decision up to his heir), Wade’s soon-to-be-ex girlfriend Samantha/Art3mis brings this up as a potential reason to keep the device a secret.

“Of course I understand its potential, you idiot!” Samantha shouts. She looks around the table. “Christ! Haven’t any of you rewatched The Matrix lately? Or Sword Art Online? Plugging your brain and your nervous system directly into a computer simulation is never a good idea!

For those who are blissfully ignorant, Sword Art Online is about a full-immersion VR MMO that gets hijacked by its creator so that anyone who dies in the game dies in real life; this is accomplished via the game’s associated VR headset, which has the ability to microwave people’s brains if misused. It’s brought up here because the plot of Ready Player Two ends up being extremely similar.

Sword Art Online’s many detractors have pointed out that there’s no way a device with this capability would ever get released onto the market. Ready Player Two actually has an advantage here; Sword Art Online takes place in a very near-future Japan that presumably has all the same oversight and health and safety laws as present day, but Ready Player Two is set in a collapsing dystopian hellscape where the government is bankrupt and corporations can do as they please. In this environment, it’s absolutely possible that an unethical company could push unsafe technology onto the market.

But the book isn’t interested in engaging with criticisms of capitalism, and Wade and his buddies run the company making the ONI, so this aspect of the technology kind of gets swept under the rug beyond Samantha’s objections--and even she’s mostly opposed to mass-producing them for other reasons, not the whole “it might fucking kill people” argument.

(Before we get to those other reasons, it’s worth pointing out that this short exchange contains the wildest fantasy scenario in the entire novel: the idea that anyone would want to watch Sword Art Online more than once. Ernest Cline deserves a Hugo award for that unparalleled act of imagination).

During the debate over what they should do with the ONI, Samantha points out that the real world is on the brink of collapse and might already be too far gone to fix; she attributes this in part to people spending too much time in the OASIS and ignoring the problems around them, and proposes that making the OASIS even more addictive and enticing isn’t going to help this situation. This argument, which repeats several times in the first third of the book, is extremely frustrating because the points she’s making seem perfectly valid, and Wade and the other protagonists don’t really have a good counter-argument beyond the ONI helping people to forget their troubles. The book feels like it ends up siding with Wade on this given how the story plays out.

The state of the planet is much more plot-relevant in Ready Player Two than it was in the first book. There, the fact that the world was collapsing into economic and ecological ruin was mostly background dressing, whereas the issue of humanity’s bleak outlook and what’s to be done about it is a key component of the plot here. In the course of discussing this, we learn that Wade, Aech and Shoto casually decided to fund the construction of an interstellar spaceship capable of reaching Alpha Centauri in less than fifty years as a backup plan in case Earth can’t be saved.

If this happened in real life, it would be the greatest scientific achievement in human history. Here, it’s something that Wade and co decide to do as a personal side project, which they achieve simply by throwing enough money at it (three hundred billion dollars, which feels like it wouldn’t be nearly enough) and which doesn’t really garner much attention from the public at large.

This is part of the book’s weird attitude towards money, which it treats as an infinite resource that can be generated from nothing, and which can solve nearly any problem. Need to conjure up a worldwide manufacturing and distribution pipeline for your new gadget? Just spend some of your company’s money, which never runs out! If you do ever run out, you can just make more, by selling cutting-edge consumer electronics to people who are nearly all living in poverty.

At one point we’re told that Wade and his friends’ charitable endeavours include funding the US government, which has been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for years; what the book never considers is whether a single company having enough money to do that might be the reason why the government is strapped for cash to begin with. Wade’s company is so rich and has such a huge monopoly that it must possess nearly all of the wealth on Earth, but this isn’t identified as a problem because the book treats wealth like free energy: inexhaustible and able to be conjured from nothing. 

I’m going to jump ahead to the end of the book for a moment, which means we’re entering spoiler territory. At the end of the story, we find out what Ernest Cline’s proposed solution for his world’s ills (which will very shortly become our world’s ills unless we do something about it soon) is: transhumanism. Wade and his adventure buddies’ OASIS avatars become fully sentient AIs and ride off into the stars along with a cache of human embryos, in order to find a habitable planet to settle and maybe even meet some friendly aliens who’ll help them evolve even further.

Pretty bleak, right? Wade, Samantha and all the flesh and blood characters have to stay on a doomed planet while their immortal digital copies sail away into space. Except not really, because the end of the book drops some vague platitudes about how the humans left behind on Earth--which, just to be clear, is almost all of them--are going to try to turn things around and fix the world after all.

But...how? The early parts of the book make it clear that the planet has already crossed the point of no return. Wade and his fellow oligarchs have been throwing trillions of dollars at the problem to no avail. What are they going to do now that they couldn’t have done before?

I’m getting extra salty over this because flying off into space and/or uploading ourselves into cyberspace or robot bodies or something is actually the preferred solution to climate change among a certain subset of internet nerds. Never mind that crossing interstellar space within a human lifespan might not be technologically feasible, never mind that generation ships would have such a small capacity that 99.9% of the population would have to be left behind, never mind that the technology to ascend our mortal coils might not be discovered in time, assuming that’s even possible in the first place. No, the solution is to make Star Trek happen. Stop spending money on combating climate change and just go hog wild on researching space travel and AI. Oh, and since capitalism and free enterprise are the driving forces of technological innovation in our current society, it goes without saying that any attempt to stymie either of those forces is to be vehemently opposed, even though they’re also the things causing the problem we’re trying to solve. Elon Musk will save us, baby!

This sort of tech utopianism is woven throughout both Ready Player One and Ready Player Two. I was annoyed at how the first book depicts Wade as solving all of his problems simply by spending enough money on a technological solution: he gains a bunch of weight and gets depressed from spending too much time in the OASIS, so he buys a fancy cyber-treadmill and an AI therapist and sorts all of his issues out easily (just like in real life!). He needs to infiltrate the bad guys’ headquarters by selling himself into indentured servitude, and his wealth and access to advanced technology let him pull it off easily. 

The second book applies this sort of thinking to the fate of humanity. Whenever the characters need to get over some sort of existential hurdle, they simply throw money at the problem and a nifty technological solution appears out of thin air. The end of the book brings up suspended animation as yet another miraculous scientific breakthrough that Wade and co effortlessly conjure up when the need arises.

I feel that this sort of thinking crosses the line from merely bad storytelling and approaches being actually irresponsible. If you propose that the solution to climate change is to place more wealth and power into the hands of billionaires so they can use their entrepreneurial genius to save us all, they and their legions of weird sycophants will nod along enthusiastically, and then the billionaires will take all the money and leave the rest of us to die. It baffles me that this isn’t obvious to some people.

I’ve spent a lot of time harping on about the books’ philosophical issues, but how’s the actual story?

It’s...fine. Once it eventually gets going, which doesn’t really happen until a third of the way through the book. It’s more or less a retread of the first book’s plot only with higher stakes, and it shares all of the first book’s positives and flaws. The main positive point is that it can be legitimately exciting and gripping at times, while the flaws include an over-reliance on repetitive pop culture references and the fact that Wade as a protagonist is hard to stomach at times.

Ah yes, Wade. In the first book, he’s a type specimen of a particular kind of internet nerd-boy: a socially awkward, mildly depressed underachiever who squanders his intelligence on pop culture obsession and video games. He gets rewarded for this by becoming one of the four richest people on the planet, which presents a big hurdle for the sequel. As unsympathetic as he could be at times, in Ready Player One Wade was still the underdog fighting against a powerful corporation. In Read Player Two, Wade is the powerful corporation. He’s Jeff Bezos, and no one likes Jeff Bezos.

(I could go on a big leftist rant here about how Cyberpunk and similar nerd genres often secretly envy corporate wealth and power while pretending to be anti-corporate, but this post is long enough already and I have a feeling I’m going to be making the same criticisms about a certain video game sometime in the next few months).

To be fair, the book is not without self-awareness in this regard. Wade spends the years between the prologue and the beginning of the story acting exactly the way sad internet boys often act in real life: being an entitled, petulant jerk who obsesses over perceived slights and alienates all of his friends. It’s hard to not read this as a dash of unflinching self-criticism on the part of the author.

But this is all for nought, partially because the book still rewards Wade with being the saviour of humanity and a reunion with Samantha, partially because he’s still the viewpoint protagonist and hero of the story, and as I’ve said before, I’m not sure it’s entirely possible to make a point of view protagonist who’s truly unsympathetic, simply because the audience is hard-wired to side with the main character of a story. If the book wanted to really hold a mirror up to Wade, it needed to do so from outside of his perspective.

The book fares better when it comes to the other sad internet boy from the first novel, James Halliday. Many people, myself included, felt that Ready Player One didn’t seem to realize that Halliday’s lifelong obsession with Kira Underwood was creepy and unsympathetic; this wasn’t helped by the fact that Kira herself is this highly idealized fantasy figure who doesn’t get humanized the same way that Halliday and Ogden Morrow did.

Ready Player One tackles both of these problems, first by giving Wade ONI-enabled flashes into Kira’s memories from childhood up to the backstory of the first book, which goes a long way towards making her seem like a real person and not a trophy for the boys to fight over; and secondly by revealing that Halliday was even more of a big creeper than before, only this time on purpose instead of by accident. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether this makes up for the first book’s problems; personally, I felt like it mostly did, although I still think that having Wade emulate Halliday’s personality and interests is sort of uncomfortable, especially given what we find out about him here.

Speaking of fixing problems from the first book, Ernest Cline decided to Go Woke for the sequel. The common wisdom among a certain subset of internet denizens is that to Go Woke inevitably leads one to also Go Broke; this is abundantly not true, but I must say that I feel like Cline’s intent here was sincere, rather than being borne of a desire to make more money or a fear that the progressive online teens would cancel him on twitter if he didn’t include enough minority representation, or whatever spurious reason nerds come up with when one of their idols makes their story more diverse.

The execution, however, is...muddled.

Ready Player One’s big stab at diversity was to reveal that Aech, Wade’s longtime OASIS friend who appeared online as a buff white straight dude, is actually a non-buff black lesbian. As far as I can tell, this is mostly in the book to demonstrate how open-minded and totally cool Wade is (the revelation has zero impact on their friendship, which feels completely unrealistic to me). It very much came off like a well-meaning grandpa trying to do the right thing, but not really “getting it” all the way. Ready Player Two does the same thing, but with gender.

We’re told that the advent of the ONI blurs the boundaries of gender identity and sexuality, as giving people the ability to live inside the memories of all sorts of different people has caused traditional gender binaries and ideas about sex and identity to break down. Sure, cool, but the thing is, that’s already happening right now in the real world, so the book in some ways ends up feeling less progressive than our current reality. For example, the OASIS gets a genderless character option years after the introduction of the ONI, but this is something that some video games coming out now in the year 2020 are including. This is another consequence of the time gap between books, but I feel like it might have been better to just retroactively pretend that our current progress on gender identity always existed in Wade’s world than attribute it to the release of the ONI (which ends up selling a lot of the actual activism that’s gotten us to this point short, now that I think about it).

The character of L0hengrin is the focal point for these issues (incidentally, how are all of these people managing to get these usernames? Two thirds of the human population are OASIS users, “mythological figure but one of the letters is a number” would have been snapped up within minutes). Wade meets her early on, then creepily uses his admin access to spy on her real world identity (he does this repeatedly throughout the novel), and we find out that she’s trans.

In the post-gender cyberpunk future that we’re told the book now takes place in, you would expect this information to not be remotely interesting or noteworthy. Trans people are becoming increasingly normalized now, despite the best efforts of reactionaries and bigots, and this is almost thirty years in the future. Instead Wade is like, “Ah, one of those transgender people I’ve heard about! That’s a person whose current gender identity doesn’t match the one they were assigned at birth! Luckily, I’m a totally chill bro and I don’t have any issue with that sort of thing!” and then Ernest Cline materializes out of your kindle and gives you a big thumbs-up, like that bit in Thor Ragnarok where Thor meets Valkyrie for the first time.

(Now I’m making pop culture references god damn it)

Yes, I’m splitting hairs here. At the end of the day Cline is still a famous author supporting normalization of trans people, which is a lot more than certain other famous authors I could name have done. But just like the revelation around Aech in the first book, it comes off like someone who maybe has their heart in the right place, but is still ultimately a little too concerned with making their protagonist (and by extension themselves) look tolerant and open minded. The fact that L0hengrin is a much more interesting character than Wade and probably should have been the main character of the book for all sorts of reasons doesn’t help. Own Voices is a thing for a reason, and I guess all I’m saying here is don’t look to Ernest Cline for authentic minority representation, but then again I don’t know why you would to begin with.

I had a similar issue with the ONI supposedly dissolving traditional notions of sex and sexuality. Wade says that living through ONI memories of sex with and as all sorts of different people has turned his notions of sexuality and his own identity on their head, just totally flipped them around turned upside down, but we never really learn what that means in practice. Is he pansexual now? Did he realize he’s more into dudes than he thought? As far as I can tell, he’s still exclusively attracted to women.

To wrap up, I have to make it clear that I didn’t hate Ready Player Two. Most of the public dunking that I’ve seen has focused on the opening chapters, and there’s a reason for that: it really does improve a lot after that point, ascending from astonishingly bad all the way up to the lofty heights of being merely middling. I feel like Ernest Cline could actually write a decent sci-fi page turner, if only he could be persuaded to stop letting his bad habits get in the way.

...That said, those opening chapters really are terrible, and also sometimes just plain baffling. Here’s the strangest paragraph in the book, which I saved for last:

New applications of ONI technology continued to reveal themselves. For example, it became fashionable for young mothers to make an ONI recording while they gave birth to their child, so that in a few decades, that child would be able to play back that recording and experience what it feels like to give birth to themselves.

And with that, I’m going to take my leave for the rest of December and probably a chunk of January. See y’all in 2021!