Just Finished Reading: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (FP: 2011)

OK, this is going to be a somewhat different review so bear with me. I saw the trailer for the movie of Ready Player One (RPO) and couldn’t help being interested. As a Gamer since around 1974 I’ve always been disappointed in how the Game/Virtual world was portrayed on screen. The Spielberg movie delivered this IN SPADES so I was more than happy with the on-line visuals. The off-line IRL scenes I was less happy with but I’ll discuss all of that when I finally get around to reviewing the movie.

Now I’ve seen RPO the Movie about 4-5 times now and, because of its Easter Egg nature am always picking up on new things. Inevitably the movie was, for me, the story despite the fact that I was holding the book in my hand. This was the first problem I had. Although I know, and have tried the educate others on the fact, that movies and books exist in very different media and can’t be reasonably or easily compared with each other the movie version in my head kept clashing with the written version in my hand and proved to be a serious impediment to me getting involved with the book. The problem was that I was being constantly drawn out of the narrative by thoughts of “well THAT’S different from the Movie!” over and over again. I mean, apart from the characters, some set pieces and the overall structure the two media are very different indeed. SPOILERS AHEAD: The first thing that jarred was the fact that, in the book, Wade was in High School. Not only of High School age but actually IN High School – indeed this fact was important to the plot. A huge difference I thought was that the whole novel was pretty much exclusively from Wade’s point of view. Although the other members of the ‘High Five’ took part in Halliday’s competition (to discover the hidden Easter Egg and take control of the company that ran the MASSIVE game called Oasis) they did so mostly separately with very little interaction with or help from the others. There was no ‘resistance’ and Art3mis most definitely wasn’t its leader. IOI, the competing software company, was the bad guy but turned out to be even more ruthless in the book than in the film where, to be honest, they were kind of incompetent and comical rather than frightening.

The two things that shocked me in the book – as opposed to the movie which in many respects was a toned down version of Cline’s vision – where the details about HOW Wade’s parents died. We only learnt that they had died in the movie (during the early period of chaos after an environmental and economic collapse) without any detail. The detail provided in the book would have made the movie both darker and certainly less child friendly. The world Cline created was MUCH darker than the typical Spielberg trope. Cline’s world is unforgiving, dangerous and pretty much without hope – if you’re stuck at the bottom of the heap that is. There are glimpse of the rich or more readily those who are ‘getting by’ but life is precarious at best for the majority of people. But I did think from time to time that although the author created this dark backdrop he didn’t quite know what to do with it. He was certainly no William Gibson in this regard. The second thing that really surprised me was that one of the High Five DIED in the real world so never made it to the final gate (so no completely soppy happy ending in the book – although there is a happy ending of sorts).

Overall the narrative arc is the same – contest, challenges, keys, IOI opposition and so on. The bombing of the ‘Stacks’ happens as does the shoot out in the nightclub but both are significantly different in the movie. Ogden Morris is far more central in the book but he doesn’t play the robotic butler. There’s no cool car chases or Shining scene (one of my favourite bits of the movie) and the book challenges are, to be honest, moderately naff and just wouldn’t have translated well to the large screen. I could go on with comparisons but I won’t. Needless to say except for the core idea, the names of the protagonists and a few set-pieces the movie and the book are worlds apart. But that’s not always a bad thing by any stretch. It was actually interesting reading the book after the film to see where the ideas came from. I could understand why Spielberg ran with some ideas and dropped others. I could see why he amped up the romance between Wade and Art3mis as well as the friendship between the members of the High Five (who actually lived all across the globe and not in the same city) and why he personified IOI more in the shape of Sorrento. RPO certainly wasn’t a bad book. I can see why it became so popular. I loved the endless references to pop culture and especially gaming culture throughout and smiled/laughed more than once as evoked memories from the 70’s and 80’s popped and fizzed in my head. This is a fun read for anyone who lived through that time and who had spent far too many hours and far too many coins in arcades playing the latest game until you could beat them completely on autopilot. Recommended to all Geeks out there – expect you’ve probably already read it by now.