The Island Journal

I tend to follow in my wife’s foot steps picking up the fiction she discards like a starving bird collecting breadcrumbs dropped by a couple of fat kids on their way through the woods so they can find their way home. I take these crumbs and devour them eagerly and sometimes… they’re juicy morsels indeed. In this case, this particular crumb… erm, book… hearkened back to my childhood in a way that it did not for her. Check out her review and you’ll see what I mean.

The story of Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is about Wade Watts, a video game nerd living in a dystopian future made bearable only by a fantastic virtual world called the Oasis, an immersive MMORPG / Internet combination. The world Cline creates is kind of a mixture of Mad Max and the Matrix in that the world is gone to hell, everyone is poor and there’s no gasoline, but most of humanity is plugged into a simulated world better than the one outside. Peppered with a bit of the cyberpunk genre with huge multi-national corporations running the world and doing evil, evil things, Cline paints a picture of a “real world” I would probably want to escape from too.

The game’s designer, James Halliday, was the typical uber-geek who lived in seclusion and worked technomiraculious wonders in the real world and the Oasis until his demise. Halliday coded an “Easter Egg” into the simulation that he posthumously announced to the entire online community and the media via his online avatar and a fancy music video. For years afterwards, people hopped to find the egg and had to research Halliday’s life and obsessions including his fascination with the 80′s and vintage video games. There are tons of references to 80′s pop culture and various defunct companies, discontinued products, and so on that jostled me back to my youth.

During the course of the search, Wade goes through some serious changes and trials in the real world and in the game universe. Ultimately, the story is not about the egg or his search for it, but the story of a man and his obsessions, friends who realize there are no limits to what friends can accomplish, and love… not just creepy cyber-stalking love, but actual love… unrequited and otherwise. I was thrilled to read that Warner Brothers bought the rights to the movie in 2010. This flick should rock… though I am concerned about all the Rush on the soundtrack.

Lindsay wrote that the references in the book were ubiquitous to the point of becoming annoying, even infuriating. I found them to be… I don’t know… touching? I was five in 1980, a teen by the time the decade ended. These are the formative years in a young geek’s life and while I understand what she is talking about, I have to disagree. Lindsay is 30 and I am 36. It’s not much of a gap now, but at the time, I was living through first jobs, Space Invaders, and the Safety Dance, Lindsay was just becoming aware of popular culture and the scope was limited some what by what was available to her age group. At fifteen when I was coming fully into geekdom, Lindsay was 9 and starting her journey into pop culture, nearly missing the 80′s and moving full throttle into the 90′s… one of the best new music decades in history. I have several friends who are six or more years older than I and in the story, the programmer Halliday was a teen in the 80′s which means they would get even more out of this book that I did.

That, I think, is the draw back here. It’s a story that I think most could enjoy just because it’s a well written and expressive one, but those who will get the most out of it are a narrow margin of people born between 1970 and 1976. While geeks into classic arcade and console games will also enjoy and relate, It’s going to mean the most to those people in the 30 to 40 age bracket who lived and were fully aware of the decade that built computers and started the cyberage.