Oh, dear. “We’ll begin, with some spin, dissing Cline, and book evisceration; context damned, prose is slammed, don’t understand the situation.”
To start with, you said, “For the right price, you can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone.” Right there, your entire premise is blown apart. The WHOLE point of the book is that an account to the OASIS costs a QUARTER; that’s 25 cents. The whole POINT is that if IOI gets control of the OASIS they will jack up the price, because everyone depends on the OASIS — for work, for school, for socializing, for life. And now a corporate interest wants to turn this egalitarian platform into a money vacuum, sucking up more money, all the public will bear. Sound familiar (coughnetneutralitycough)? Did you miss the highly relevant commentary when the main character becomes a slave to pay off his (forged) debt to that corporation — and that this was LEGAL in that world? Imagine if Citibank could put you in literal jail to work to pay off your debt. Of course you missed it; you apparently never read the book, only a single page that laid out the exposition for the main character. And you entirely missed his motivation — not to get rich but to save the world from a greedy corporation that already has too much control. This book is relevant as hell. When I read people’s reviews of the books that only focus on the pop-culture framework surrounding the main ideas, I know they only skimmed the book, or didn’t read it at all. Like yourself.