- Cline, Ernest.
Ready Player One.
New York: Broadway Books, 2011.
ISBN 978-0-307-88744-3.
-
By the mid-21st century, the Internet has become largely
subsumed as the transport layer for the OASIS (Ontologically
Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation), a massively
multiuser online virtual reality environment originally
developed as a multiplayer game, but which rapidly evolved into
a platform for commerce, education, social interaction, and
entertainment used by billions of people around the world. The
OASIS supports immersive virtual reality, limited only by the
user's budget for hardware used to access the network. With
top-of-the-line visors and sound systems, body motion sensors,
and
haptic
feedback, coupled to a powerful interface console, a
highly faithful experience was possible. The OASIS was the
creation of James Halliday, a legendary super-nerd who made
his first fortune designing videogames for home computers in
the 1980s, and then re-launched his company in 2012 as
Gregarious Simulation Systems (GSS), with the OASIS as
its sole product. The OASIS was entirely open source: users
could change things within the multitude of worlds within
the system (within the limits set by those who created them),
or create their own new worlds. Using a distributed computing
architecture which pushed much of the processing power to the
edge of the network, on users' own consoles, the system was
able to grow without bound without requiring commensurate
growth in GSS data centres. And it was free, or
almost so. To access the OASIS, you paid only a one-time
lifetime sign-up fee of twenty-five cents, just like the quarter
you used to drop into the slot of an arcade videogame. Users
paid nothing to use the OASIS itself: their only costs were the
hardware they used to connect (which varied widely in cost and
quality of the experience) and the bandwidth to connect to the
network. But since most of the processing was done locally,
the latter cost was modest. GSS made its money selling or
renting virtual real estate (“surreal estate”)
within the simulation. If you wanted to open, say, a shopping
mall or build your own Fortress of Solitude on an asteroid,
you had to pay GSS for the territory. GSS also sold virtual
goods: clothes, magical artefacts, weapons, vehicles of all
kinds, and buildings. Most were modestly priced, but since
they cost nothing to manufacture, were pure profit to the
company.
As the OASIS permeated society, GSS prospered. Halliday remained
the majority shareholder in the company, having bought back
the share once owned by his co-founder and partner Ogden (“Og”)
Morrow, after what was rumoured to be a dispute between the
two the details of which had never been revealed. By 2040, Halliday's
fortune, almost all in GSS stock, had grown to more than
two hundred and forty billion dollars. And then, after fifteen
years of self-imposed isolation which some said was due to
insanity, Halliday died of cancer. He was a bachelor, with no
living relatives, no heirs, and, it was said, no friends. His
death was announced on the OASIS in a five minute video
titled Anaorak's Invitation (“Anorak”
was the name of Halliday's all-powerful avatar within
the OASIS). In the film, Halliday announces that his will
places his entire fortune in escrow
until somebody completes the quest he has programmed within
the OASIS:
Three hidden keys open three secret gates,
Wherein the errant will be tested for worthy traits,
And those with the skill to survive these straits,
Will reach The End where the prize awaits.
The prize is Halliday's entire fortune and, with it, super-user
control of the principal medium of human interaction, business,
and even politics. Before fading out, Halliday shows three
keys: copper, jade, and crystal, which must be obtained to
open the three gates. Only after passing through the gates
and passing the tests within them, will the intrepid paladin
obtain the Easter egg hidden within the OASIS and gain control
of it. Halliday provided a link to Anorak's Almanac,
more than a thousand pages of journal entries made during his
life, many of which reflect his obsession with 1980s
popular culture, science fiction and fantasy, videogames,
movies, music, and comic books. The clues to finding the keys and
the Egg were widely believed to be within this rambling,
disjointed document.
Given the stakes, and the contest's being open to anybody in the
OASIS, what immediately came to be called the Hunt became a
social phenomenon, all-consuming to some. Egg hunters, or
“gunters”, immersed themselves in Halliday's journal
and every pop culture reference within it, however obscure.
All of this material was freely available on the OASIS, and
gunters memorised every detail of anything which had caught
Halliday's attention. As time passed, and nobody succeeded in
finding even the copper key (Halliday's memorial site displayed
a scoreboard of those who achieved goals in the Hunt, so far
blank), many lost interest in the Hunt, but a dedicated hard
core persisted, often to the exclusion of all other diversions.
Some gunters banded together into “clans”, some
very large, agreeing to exchange information and, if one found the
Egg, to share the proceeds with all members. More sinister were the
activities of Innovative Online Industries—IOI—a
global Internet and communications company which controlled
much of the backbone that underlay the OASIS. It had assembled
a large team of paid employees, backed by the
research and database facilities of IOI, with their sole
mission to find the Egg and turn control of the OASIS over
to IOI. These players, all with identical avatars and names
consisting of their six-digit IOI employee numbers, all of which
began with the digit “6”, were called “sixers”
or, more often in the gunter argot, “Sux0rz”.
Gunters detested IOI and the sixers, because it was no secret
that if they found the Egg, IOI's intention was to close the
architecture of the OASIS, begin to charge fees for access,
plaster everything with advertising, destroy anonymity, snoop
indiscriminately, and use their monopoly power to put their
thumb on the scale of all forms of communication including
political discourse. (Fortunately, that couldn't happen to us
with today's enlightened, progressive Silicon Valley overlords.)
But IOI's financial resources were such that whenever a rare and
powerful magical artefact (many of which had been created by
Halliday in the original OASIS, usually requiring the completion
of a quest to obtain, but freely transferrable thereafter) came
up for auction, IOI was usually able to outbid even the largest
gunter clans and add it to their arsenal.
Wade Watts, a lone gunter whose avatar is named Parzival, became
obsessed with the Hunt on the day of Halliday's death, and,
years later, devotes almost every minute of his life not spent
sleeping or in school (like many, he attends school in the
OASIS, and is now in the last year of high school) on the Hunt,
reading and re-reading Anorak's Almanac, reading,
listening to, playing, and viewing everything mentioned therein,
to the extent he can recite the dialogue of the movies from
memory. He makes copious notes in his “grail
diary”, named after the one kept by Indiana Jones. His
friends, none of whom he has ever met in person, are all gunters
who congregate on-line in virtual reality chat rooms such as
that run by his best friend, Aech.
Then, one day, bored to tears and daydreaming in Latin class,
Parzival has a flash of insight. Putting together a message
buried in the Almanac that he and many other
gunters had discovered but failed to understand, with a bit
of Latin and his encyclopedic knowledge of role playing games,
he decodes the clue and, after a demanding test, finds
himself in possession of the Copper Key. His name, alone, now
appears at the top of the scoreboard, with 10,000 points.
The path to the First Gate was now open.
Discovery of the Copper Key was a sensation: suddenly Parzival,
a humble level 10 gunter, is a worldwide celebrity (although
his real identity remains unknown, as he refuses all media offers
which would reveal or compromise it). Knowing that the key can
be found re-energises other gunters, not to speak of IOI, and
Parzival's footprints in the OASIS are scrupulously examined for
clues to his achievement. (Finding a key and opening a gate
does not render it unavailable to others. Those who subsequently
pass the tests will receive their own copies of the key, although
there is a point bonus for finding it first.)
So begins an epic quest by Parzival and other gunters,
contending with the evil minions of IOI, whose potential gain is
so high and ethics so low that the risks may extend beyond the
OASIS into the real world. For the reader, it is a nostalgic
romp through every aspect of the popular culture of the 1980s:
the formative era of personal computing and gaming. The level
of detail is just staggering: this may be the geekiest nerdfest
ever published. Heck, there's even a reference to an erstwhile
Autodesk employee! The only goof I noted is a mention of the
“screech of a 300-baud modem during the log-in
sequence”. Three hundred baud modems did not have the
characteristic squawk and screech sync-up of faster modems which
employ
trellis
coding. While there are a multitude of references to details
which will make people who were there, then, smile, readers who
were not immersed in the 1980s and/or less familiar with its
cultural minutiæ can still enjoy the challenges, puzzles
solved, intrigue, action, and epic virtual reality battles
which make up the chronicle of the Hunt. The conclusion is
particularly satisfying: there may be a bigger world than even
the OASIS.
A movie based
upon the novel, directed by Steven Spielberg, is scheduled
for release in March 2018.
August 2017 