Ready Player One Explained
Ready Player One is a bold experiment in observing the growing tension between reality and artificial worlds. Enough changes have been made to the movie to annoy a significant portion of the audience familiar with the book, and with its numerous pop-culture references, the film developed it own type of bloatware. Nevertheless, Ready Player One is an important cautionary tale. It masterfully surprises the subtle agonistic relationships embedded deep within our approach to mixed reality, where one side, the artificial, constantly tries to replace the other, the real. The story reveals this problem by showing play-as-contest in the form of a zero-sum game.
Ready Player One is set soon after a revolt against ISPs caused by bandwidth shortage and other trivial, yet somehow profoundly meaningful, limitations. James Halliday created a free-to-play MMORPG without rules or limitations, the Oasis. In the introduction, Wade Watts, the protagonist known in the Oasis as Parzival and sometimes referred to as Z by his friends, tells us that “[p]eople came to the Oasis for all the things they can do. People stay for what they can be.”
People cannot be much offline. The film introduces us to a high-tech, overpopulated, Oklahoma City, where drones deliver pizza or spy on you. Living in the “stacks”, where mobile homes have been stacked vertically to resemble towers of severe poverty, people seem to have given up on the world. They want to escape from reality and to something else. The Oasis offers this opportunity. In effect, Halliday gave people the Matrix.
Matrix-like virtual reality has a long tradition in science fiction. It is usually celebrated or taken to a point that it appears natural. After all, humanity simulates reality through fiction at least since the Epic of Gilgamesh. Simulation, in addition, also reveals the tendency to transport individuals in a temporary (sometimes permanent) world of comfort. Unlike the Matrix, where machines coerce individuals physically and mentally to remain in the simulation, Ready Player One explores this issue without the intent of declaring victory of the real over the virtual. A short story by Ray Bradbury, The Veldt, published in 1950, imagines a special room where “you sent out your thoughts. Whatever you thought would appear” (Bradbury 1993). The room, referred to sometimes as “the nursery”, proceeds in subtle ways to replace reality by affecting traditional relationships of loyalty among family members to a point that when the parents want to shut it down, the children murder them. Thus, as others have anticipated, Bradbury implicitly proclaims the victory of artificial worlds.
This issue is different in Ready Player One. Deeply worried about the implications of his creation, noticing the extent of abandonment of the real world, James Halliday left the Oasis players upon his death with an opportunity: find the three keys to unlock the “Easter egg” and receive an item with special powers, get a lot of currency, and total control of the Oasis — with the ability to shut it down.
Of course, Parzival will retrieve the first key. But Art3mis, his crush online and soon-to-be real love offline, a competent and resourceful player desires the “egg” to shut down the Oasis. Parzival has no such intentions. In fact, Wade has no other goals than to be online. He lives in the stacks and is without purpose. However, Art3mis, Samantha in the real world, offers him purpose in real love.
The first key enables the suspension of agonistic mentality while the remainders unlock love in the real world. The entire challenge requires a change in mentality, from the traditional, play-as-contest to the achievable in the virtual world of the Oasis.
The concept of play-as-contest has ancient tradition. In the Homeric epics, play is understood as agon and athlon to mean contents resolved through physical strength but becomes in Plato a concept to denote nonviolent cultural play (Spariosu 1989). The Dutch historian and play scholar, Johan Huizinga, locates play-as-contest as central to the development of civilization. For Huizinga, play exhibits a series of formal characteristics: it is a “free activity” intended “outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘non serious’” that immerses the player completely; it has “proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules” and promotes order, and it facilitates the formation of social groups “which tend to surround themselves with secrecy” (Huizinga 1960). While Huizinga specifically pointed out that play “is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it” the dynamics and mechanisms of play remain agonistic since to win means material gain in the world of Ready Player One. The leader of the infamous Innovative Online Industries, Nolan Sorrento, confirms this when he tells his corporate acolyte F’Nale that “a game decides our fate”.
Operating with this agonistic mentality, the numerous Halliday scholars hired by the corporation to investigate the memories of the creator to discover clues about the keys are unsuccessful. Parzival and his friends appear to be always one step ahead by evaluating Halliday’s memories stored in an interactive virtual archive through a different approach. For example, the first key is the price of a race. The first to finish the race would receive the key, as anyone would know. Obstacles for the high-speed racing game include King Kong and T-Rex, among others. Parzival’s research reveals that the way to get the key is not by winning the race through defeating the other players, but by simply driving backwards, in the opposite direction.
To find the remaining two keys, the IOI scholars and leader focus on the Oasis itself in the memories of Halliday. Parzival and friends do not. Instead they sense that the most meaningful part in Halliday’s life was “the step not taken” to pursue the love of Kira Underwood. However, to be successful the group needs to understand the rules of the game and wisely use virtual items for protection from IOI and against the Oasis itself. For example, after Parzival received a significant amount of in-game credits for finding the first key, he spends most of them on items that would boost his virtual performance — just like many players of World of Warcraft were seeking Shadowmourne at the time the novel was written.
The final challenge is revealing of the peaceful potential of play. Instead of trying to win the game, to defeat the game, the player had to enjoy the game. And this is the most significant conclusions of Ready Player One, as Wade puts it: “it is not about winning. It is about playing.”
The group receives control of the Oasis, even the ability to shut it down. Given the circumstances, the world would benefit from returning its attention to the real and clean up its mess. While that makes sense, it would also mean a return to the agonistic mentality of replacement — reality is triumphant — without a chance given to the Oasis. E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops proposes such a solution. Instead, the group decides to turn the Oasis off for two days per week because “as painful reality can be. It is also the only place where you can get a real meal. Because reality is real.” The decision, in addition, allows for the exploration of the artificial world through the newfound mentality outside of replacement.
The Oasis, therefore, reminds us of the potential of cyberspace to experiment with new values in virtual worlds where new realities may emerge to mend our offline agonistic tendencies. “Thus, we can proceed as if something (authentic irenic worlds, for example) were known outside our world of power, even though that something may be incommensurable with our own knowledge. […] And we can begin moving away [from our world of power] only when our imagination accepts the possibility of worlds outside those with which we are already familiar. […] Nothing can stop us from creating ourselves anew, from producing alternative values and, consequently, new worlds, if we become dissatisfied with our old ones” (Spariosu 1997).
References
Huizinga, Johan (1960), Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, The Beacon Press, p. 13
Bradbury, Ray (1993), The Veldt, in Karie Jacobson (ed.), Simulations, Citadel Press
Spariosu, I., Mihai (1989), Dionysus Reborn. Play and the Aesthetic Dimension in Modern Philosophical and Scientific Discourse, Cornell University Press
Spariosu, Mihai, I. (1997), The Wreath of Wild Olive, State University of New York Press
