Ready Player One review

    

Unlike my past blogs where I review an Interactive Fiction game and provide a screen cast of me playing the work provided, today I will be reviewing the novel call Ready Player one. 

 Ready Player One by Ernest Cline has an intriguing premise: a treasure hunt filled with puzzles and pop culture references in a massive virtual reality, multiplayer game. The world that Cline creates can appeal to many different types of audiences and has many different topics.  In Ready Player One people adopt avatars that can represent who they want to be, not how they actually are in reality. This tension between virtual worlds and reality runs throughout the book, and you could definitely read Ready Player One through a a enhanced lens about the nature of technology and reality. In this past year due to the pandemic, people have been more tethered than ever to technology, either with fearful Twitter or perpetual Zoom meetings, and Ready Player One’s idea of the virtual world replacing the real one isn’t so far off. 

I think it’s an interesting choice to bring a video game-like structure to literature. Video games have narratives, characters, settings, and other literary elements, and Ready Player One brings video game aspects like levels, gamification, and Easter eggs to literature in its creation of the Oasis. I recommend this book to young people who might be into video games but not as much into literature. 

Reading about Wade Watts and his side kicks adventuring through the oasis solving Hallady's puzzles was great. The reader is also met with the task to try and discover the clues to the puzzles before reading the clue. This a natural for the reader with out even realizing they are doing it. The novel provides lots of anticipation and anxiety and I was pleased. 

Overall the book was amazing. Combining the future and present into one book was an outstanding idea by Ernest Cline. The characters a depicted very well and can create very accurate mental pictures of the 5 main characters. I am not much a reader however this novel provided me with great interest with every page that was flipped. The novel is very easy to understand and keeps you interested with every single chapter.