Book Review

Ready Player One
Ernest Cline

At the end of July, in his weekly trivia contest email, Ken Jennings had a question about the book Ready Player One, which I had never heard of.  The question, and answer:

What 2011 best-seller by Ernest Cline about 1980s geek culture takes its title from the phrase that opened many old coin-operated video games?  This novel--a must-read for '80s refugees, and now in development at Warner Bros.--is called Ready Player One.

I took a little mental note about the book, and in my head I saw it being some sort of historical look at the word of video games in the 80's.   A few things I remember about video games in the 80's:

• My grandma in Indiana had an Atari system that I think was my aunt's at the time.  When we visited, you could find it hidden behind the television.  (likely in an attempt to keep us kids away from it...)  I would play pac-man when I got the chance, until we were chased out of the house, after which I usually hung out in the barn.
• At one point, we had a Colecovision, with it's odd little wheel and button controller.  For a while, my parents kept it in the sun porch room, in the Winter it had no heat.  I spent plenty of hours sitting in there with my coat on, try my best to beat Donkey Kong.  We also had Defender, and I think Frogger, but I preferred Donkey Kong...
• At one point, we had an IBM PC, or a clone, with a turbo button.  Later, we had several.  I don't remember all the games we had, but I know we had two, Zork and Digger.  I you forgot to underclock for Digger, the thing went massively fast.  Lots of time playing Digger...
• I had a paper route went we lived in North Buffalo.  There was a Pizza place on the corner of Kenmore and Delaware, with a couple of video game machines.  There was a penny candy store a few doors down from that.  If I hurried on some days, I could run down to the penny candy store, and get in one game on the video game machines at the pizza place, before I went home.  Later, I had a paper route with a bowling alley at the end of it.  I spent way too much time on the pinball machines in there, and got into trouble for being there late on a number of occasions...

Anyway, our local public library participates in a statewide online ebook lending site.  I found this book there, reserved it, and eventually got to check it out.  It ended up being the first ebook I have actually finished reading on my iPad. I've started a few others, but haven't finished them yet.  By the time I got this book, I had a little time to read, and popped it off in a weekend.

The book is set 30 years in the future, where the world has used up all it's fossil fuels, people largely spend all their time in this online system - work, school, play, etc.  A virtual reality visor and haptic feedback clothing is used with the system, called Oasis, to immerse the people in whatever virtual world they were in.

In this future world, a video game tycoon, who built Oasis, decides to leave his fortune to the person that could figure out his puzzles, beat his games, etc - to collect the three keys.

In the end, this book spent plenty of time paying tribute to different 80's 'stuff' - games, movies, video games, books, music, tv, stuff like that.  A lot, but not all, of the book was spent in the virtual reality world, so the author simply had fun with that.  The main character at one point acted out the movie "War Games", played and talked a lot about video games, etc.  At one point, the main character went to a world based on Zork, with hundreds of little white houses...

It was a relatively short book, and seemed to me like it ended kind of abruptly.  Not abruptly ala "The Sphere", where you finished, and wondered what just happened, and if the author was late for an appointment when he was trying to get done with the book, but this book was going and going, and just sort of wound down quickly at the end.  I suspect some publisher wanted to leave the door open for a sequel (or a trilogy!  How about a trilogy?), and had the book ended that way.  This is a soap box issue for me, I don't like that.  Especially when the next book takes fifty pages getting you caught up, in case you didn't read the first book.

I liked the book, it reminded me of lots of video games from my youth.  I haven't gone out and played any of those, although I did dust off Age of Empires III a few days ago.  Not the 80's, but not a 2012 game, either...  I recommend this book to anyone who spent more than a little time playing video games in the 80's or watching cartoons of that era.

If the author does do a sequel, and it ends up being about the 90's, I am likely to be disappointed.  I don't know why, really, I just figure I will.  Maybe it's because the 80's seem so much further away these days...