Ready PLayer One {Spoilers Possible}

Ready Player One

As it's appeared on so many of the reading threads I thought I'd start a topic for anyone to chime in. Thanks to whoever it was who first alerted me to this!

Thoughts - not just 80s references many of the 90s and early 00s are there too - World of Warcraft
for one

Power: I can just about see the individual kits being solar powered, but in a world of shortages what is powering the GSS servers? They've a vast vast load requirement (cf google) and I'm surprised there is fuelf ofr them at any price.

I suspect make or break on this book for me will be the ending, something that's very tricky to do well. I'm only a few pages in but really enjoying it so far. I'll bow out of the thread now and check back in when I've finished it in a few days.

I'm going to star this and come back after I've read the book. It's sitting beside my chair waiting to be read soon. :)

Oh, fun! The Geek Girls book club I'm in read this in January, and I loved it. The mix of geeky references and feeling like you're actually questing with the character were a lot of fun.

I thought about the fuel issue too; I think if you assume hardly any fuel is being diverted for personal vehicles, it's probable that companies like OASIS would have no problem staying in business. After all, they make it possible for individuals to conserve even more by basically not leaving their homes, whether it's for business, education, or pleasure.

Ok, enough rambling, hope y'all enjoy it as much as I did!

I got this from my secret santa last year and it was read within a few days that I recieved it- it was so fun and absorbing. I don't MMORPG but I play all the solo RPG ones and have sunk about 200 hours of my life into Skyrim. It's a great read for 80's kiddies and gamers of all denominations.

I've never played video or online games, but still really enjoyed this book. As I said on my reading journal, it's not great literature but it is a good, fun read whcih kept me gripped. I thought the characters were excellent and liked the worldbuilding both inside and outside the OASIS. It has a bit of a message but doesn't hit you over the head with it. And I literally couldn't put the book down during part 3.

LOVED IT. all the way through. One of those books that you can't put down, and when you have to, it keeps nagging at the back of your mind all day. Just another chapter, find out what happens next. Hence I'm back on this thread after only a couple of days. Really really impressed. I think the character interactions were possibly best a deep understanding of the difference and similarities between online and offline personalities.

Amy at #3 " feeling like you're actually questing with the character "
Absolutely agree. Was very immersive like that, worked very well.

Full Review is here But very very little that's negative to say about it. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who read it and didn't like it - why not? Although there is a specific demographic to which this will appeal, and perhaps it won't work outside that.

The ending was perhaps slightly predictable, but it worked much much better than I feared when I wrote the opening post.

I'm another who has never played multi-player online games, but really enjoyed this book. I did play a lot of arcade video games back in the 1980s -- a local arcade that I could bike to gave out to free tokens for every "A" on a report card. Funny how the boy down the street remembered to hang out with me around report card time!

I'm pretty sure I even played that jousting game at one point. I remember pushing a button to flap wings.....

I guess my only quibble about the book was the number of times the main character told us that he had memorized every line, or memorized every scene, or memorized every (whatever). There is a point where he says something like "well, if you spend 12 hours every day doing this, you can memorize a lot" but I still didn't quite believe that his memory could be that good.

I liked how we gradually learned more about the characters behind the other online personas.

I have mixed feelings about this one. Some of the writing felt as if he was laying it out for a movie and I didn't like noticing that. On the other hand, the story and the world drew me in so that I wasn't noticing after awhile. I liked the characters and the world, and the imagination which went into building the world, but not being a gamer, I would get impatient when there started to be a lot of description of the games. Then again, the story was very compelling and fun to read. I liked the way the author showed how living in a virtual world could have some incredible good points and some very big ills at the same time.

Hard for me to swallow Og coming to the glorious rescue at the last moment. I wondered about the farmers or people who lived outside the cities. I don't see why it would be a barren wasteland. People managed to farm and live without fossil fuels for thousands of years before we invented steam and petroleum-based fuel engines. We could certainly do it again. But my quibbles with the world were easily shrugged off so I could return to the story.

I also liked the portrayal of free education on the net, with descriptions of some things they did to avoid cheating, fighting, etc. during classes. I have taken many online classes and much prefer face-to-face classes, but I can see things headed the direction of this book in terms of education, since school districts keep getting their budgets slashed and slashed and slashed.....

Interesting also that economics are still alive and well inside the virtual world. For instance, our main character started out dirt poor, so he had to do a lot of silly quests inside the virtual world to earn its currency, to be able to travel further and buy equipment inside the virtual world.

I was a bit confused as to how credits in the virtual world translated to money in the real world, but my son said that is happening right now in games. If you find an artifact, you can auction it to the highest bidder and they pay with their Visa into your account. Mind boggling.

I love the idea of the virtual classroom and the teaching possibilities, but then I think of all the children sitting somewhere wired up all day and it makes me a bit sad. That's what I meant about the great good of the social possibilities, and the great ill of the real world isolation at the same time.

I'm disabled and am getting an Associates in Accounting all through online classes. It would not have been possible without the Internet.

I used to play a game that you could buy silvers and items for it for money and people definitely made livings off of it. For instance, one million in-game silvers cost 14 real dollars.

Ernie Cline is giving away a DeLorean if you can find the easter egg in Ready Player One . Three keys to open three secret gates. More here.

I'm re-reading now to locate the easter egg :o)

I really enjoyed this book, thanks to reading_fox for the suggestion.

I listened to the Wil Wheaton read it, I think he was a very good choice and he did it so well.

I look forward to seeing what Ernest Cline comes up with next.

Ooh, I didn't know Wil Wheaton did the audio book! I may have to hunt that down. He also did John Scalzi's Redshirts. :-)

Loved loved loved this book.

#12 - Wow! That's pretty cool. I'll tell my son about it. Good luck!

#10 - the other way it works is that cash rich time poor gamers pay real money to someone (usually in asia) to do all the boring little quests that earn the experience/find the items, they then have a tough experienced equipped character ready to have fun without spending the weeks normally necessary to get there.

#12 - that is sooo cool.

MrsLee - I do agree about the film feel, I think there are already plans in motion for a film to be produced.
I don't know that being 'wired up all day' learning, is actually nay worse than being stuck in a classroom all day learning.

I though the book quite entertaining but not mind-boggingly good. The nostalgia galore trip ticked me off and hadn't it been for the good albeit a bit derivative worldbuilding, the civilization critique, and the interaction between the characters, online and offline, I would had thought the book 110% cotton candy.

It is not a book that I would recommend to anyone; but I wouldn't discourage reading it either, should anyone ask my advice.

Also loved the stacked trailer housing -- and the paperback edition has that as its cover art. Pretty inventive, I think.

Couldn't put this book down either, which is odd since most of the 1980 pop-culture trivia was lost on me (and I was a kid in the 1980s!).
I think it was the pitting of the evil corporation versus regular users in the fight over the OASIS that really made this book seem very contemporary and relevant.