Ready Player One

Do you wish someone - JUST SOMEONE - would make a 1980s-fetishizing nostalgia-fest of some mainstream hegemonic geekery? And did you somehow miss: the Blade Runner reboot, the Star Wars reboots, the Indiana Jones reboot, the Battlestar Galactica reboot, the goddamn Fuller House reboot, Stranger Things, and the fact that Hollywood no longer makes any original content?!

Do you YEARN for someone to retell that plight of the white boy geek, with all its hilarious and heartbreaking stereotypes such as: (1) being pale and socially awkward while pining after a girl you don't know anything about! (2) attributing a sacred romantic connection via your certified Nice Guy(tm) behavior! (3) attributing sacred importance to knowing obscure pop culture (American, middle class) trivia! (4) the HIERARCHY OF POP CULTURE - for example, the received wisdom that Empire Strikes Back is the best Star Wars, synthwave is good music, and other Received Wisdoms that YOU SHALL NOT DOUBT!

Do you also enjoy having this tale of the worship of a totally corporate hegemonic geekery wrapped up in a moral fable that is ostensibly about how EVIL corporate hegemonic geekery is!?! Ha HA!

Well... maybe you do. I certainly don't! And so I found this book boring as hell, with ugh values. Look. I grew up as a geeky girl in Pennsylvania, right next door to Ernest Cline's Ohio. I was a middle class American geek. I thought Blade Runner was the pinnacle of fine cinema, I played text-based RPGs on my crappy ass AOL 56kbps connection, and I re-watched Star Wars many times. In other words, I was a super basic, standard issue geek, with nary an original thought. Now, together with the rest of my geek generation, we're using our consumer spending power to protract this adolescence and further idolize Boba Fett and inculcate this stuff as a cultural religion. It's SO BORING. Simon Pegg had some good thoughts about this a few years ago.

Anyway, I grew up becoming more and more aware of how Mainstream White Dude Geekery often gate-kept me out of their shit. I didn't realize this at first, but now that I'm an older lady, I notice it fast and have zero patience left.

WHICH BRINGS ME TO THIS BOOK!

This book is the PINNAAAAACLLLE of gatekeeping white boy geekery. It perpetuates a super narrow view of what it means to be a “real geek”, and its ideas of geekery are completely frozen in time in the 1990s. The banter of Parzival, the hero, and his buddy, Aech, as they hang out in the virtual reality World of Warcraft-esque “OASIS” reminded me of middle school; not in a good way. “Chick flick” and “fag” are early insults, and the whole book can be summarized as a laundry list catalog of 1980s cultural references (as well as lots of our narrator TELLING us about how deep the laundry list goes - dude, oh God, I don't care).

The plot is a “capture the flag” tournament, embedded in the OASIS virtual reality world. The real world is a standard issue shitty dystopia, with paper thin worldbuilding. There's some awed references to “coding” and “l33t h4x0rs” that felt really tired. And, oh yeah, the only ladies in the story are a love interest (who the hero falls in love with instantly) and a shock reveal that felt, oh man, pretty social justice shoe-horned in.

Throughout the book, I was like, but how self-aware is all this? Is this a kinda meta commentary on white guy hegemonic geekery? The social justice shoe-horn towards the end of the book shows Cline means well. There's scenes where Parzival, in the real dystopian world, seems to be aware that he's missing out on reality outside. These scenes feel like they might be from The Machine Stops, an early 1900s proto-sci fi about a world where people fear direct, unmediated interaction with reality and live in underground hives. I laughed out loud about how Cory Doctorow and Wil Wheaton are the politician-gods of OASIS. BUUTTTT then we get more and more laundry lists of 1980s cultural paraphernalia, and we're off again.

I mean, for the love of God, this imagines a future world (WORLD, WHOLE PLANET) that is frozen in cultural time, has had no progress, diversity or advancement of its world culture, and everyone just frickin' loves their spoonfed Lucasfilm. Aaaaaghrhrghgrhh I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR XP POINTS, I DON'T CARE ABOUT INANE TRIVIA, AND I SAY THIS AS A PERSON WHO REALLY DOES ENJOY LUCASFILM, ZEMECKIS, SPIELBERG AND ALL THAT SHIT, BUT I WANT MORE FROM MY LIFE OKAY I WANT THAT AND OTHER THINGS, OTHER IDEAS, OTHER VIEWPOINTS

Okay, okay, sorry. It got away from me. But the thing that's especially disappointing is that the whole “virtual reality as safe space for geekery” HAS been done well and better by Cory Doctorow (!) indeed in the much smarter In Real Life and For the Win. So yeah, read those instead.