It started with my damn Apple news feed... An article about Ready Player One, that i did not need to read. But, it had the promise of classic 80s video games online.
I do not love the algorithms that know what we will want to read, and present it to us. I have read (and watched) this all before. Dystopias come in many shapes and sizes - but a lot of them rhyme.
I knew as soon as it came out, of course, that Ready Player One was going to be a book (and then a movie!) for me. It's in my lane, but i resisted. In part, because Vernor Vinge's exceptional book Rainbows End felt like it was being ripped off (at least in the descriptions i heard of Cline's book).
With the premiere of Spielberg's movie fast approaching, i recalled while playing a couple of (dozen) rounds of Joust that i had downloaded the audiobook of Ready Player One (narrated by Wil Wheaton!) a while back during one of my stints of Audible membership. I knew that if i didn't listen to it before the movie premiere, i would likely never read the book.
And so i dove in a few nights ago... and i am HOOKED. The geek culture made relevant, and powerful. It's so good - not great, but tons of fun, and referential. I've finished a third of the novel - i love the Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey nod, and feel like i may finish the rest in not too many days.
And then will probably just go straight out and see the movie as soon as it's out too... because because.
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| Source: Polygon.com |
I knew as soon as it came out, of course, that Ready Player One was going to be a book (and then a movie!) for me. It's in my lane, but i resisted. In part, because Vernor Vinge's exceptional book Rainbows End felt like it was being ripped off (at least in the descriptions i heard of Cline's book).
With the premiere of Spielberg's movie fast approaching, i recalled while playing a couple of (dozen) rounds of Joust that i had downloaded the audiobook of Ready Player One (narrated by Wil Wheaton!) a while back during one of my stints of Audible membership. I knew that if i didn't listen to it before the movie premiere, i would likely never read the book.
And so i dove in a few nights ago... and i am HOOKED. The geek culture made relevant, and powerful. It's so good - not great, but tons of fun, and referential. I've finished a third of the novel - i love the Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey nod, and feel like i may finish the rest in not too many days.
And then will probably just go straight out and see the movie as soon as it's out too... because because.
And now I've seen Steven Spielberg's version of Ready Player One, and I am starting to understand the furor and outcry that has been developing. It's a fun movie, and a respectable entry into the Spielberg oeuvre.
ReplyDeleteBut, it doesn't understand its source material. Neither of course do most of the critics who have been trashing both the novel and the new movie as nerd porn.
The movie comes to the conclusion that real life is better than simulated life. Except it's not. 2045 is a disaster. It's a world that has given up on solving the real problems at hand, and instead finds escape and distraction in a mediated simulacrum of everyday life. It's a world so economically disparate that most of the population survive in "stacks" - low income housing where communities of folks just trying to get by and stay out of too much debt are held together by a weak force of will and community...
While the backlash is perhaps a political reaction, it's largely been written by folks who claim to "get" the nerd culture that is targeted and fed by the endless references in both the book and movie. (And btw the articles that posture themselves as pieces "about" the backlash are in fact the backlash).
The primary misreading of Ready Player One comes when the word "escapism" is used derogatively. It's a misunderstanding of the fact that getting bogged down and lost in the minutiae and trivial points of a subject (nerdy or not) is, for some, the joy of the thing. Spending every waking moment fixating on spell components and obsessively collecting them (preferably out of session) or playing Pac-Man or any other game (or going to work and racking up bank points called "money") until you have the highest score... or a high enough score... or enough... is a part of the make-up of everyday life.
The articles that bemoan the escapism of Ready or of nerd culture writ large miss the point. The point is that the acquisition of wealth as a primary driver of life is arbitrary. Some will quickly point out that you can buy things like peanut butter and cars and rent with the "bank points", which you cannot do with the experience points racked up (wracked up?) in the game Diablo (that post is really worth a re-read). This is true, but doesn't make it any more real. The peanut butter is real. The points that you spend to buy it are not. They are a political creation (capital) that you can exchange, which is exactly what the high scores or spell components are.
Being interested (and perhaps even obsessed) with something isn't a waste if you enjoy it. Be happy in what you do. If we all did that, i think things might improve by 2045...
The Diablo Points Post is the post i was referring to in that last comment...
ReplyDelete