The first 93
The first 93 pages of the book Ready Player One demonstrates the life of a teenager Wade Watts. The greatest video game ever created turned into a competition not to only those who used video games but to the whole world. A competition intended for the world of the future worth hundreds of billions of dollars, after the death of the creator of this video game who turned into one of the richest after his creation announced that whoever finds the “easter egg” had all his riches.
The world had come to a state that no one imagines today, where the earth has overpopulated to the rim and people are fortunate if they find a job, the alternative however to life for people of all ages was the OASIS. Halliday’s ultimate creation. Where this game was a life on a different planet in a video game console, everything that the world couldn’t supply anymore the game supplied, education, sports, movies, books, it was a real world.
Utopian Society
OASIS is an escape of the future into a different future. Imagine a world within a gaming console, that is used as jobs for people, daily activities, all of your life essentially other than food and where you sleep is in that console.
In Wade Watts case like majority of others in the world, escaped for a reason into the virtual world. There were many reasons for Wade to stay into this virtual reality but the main reason was because of who he was and his background. His parents died when he was young and his guardian which was now his aunt, he wasn’t welcome in her room and couldn’t bring anything of value home or she’d take it and sell it. He spent most of his time and slept in his hideout, this is where he kept the computers that he went on for the OASIS.
Most people who lived in the stacks didn’t have jobs at all, the future overpopulated as ever made life really hard for people without jobs. The OASIS was the nearest thing to a good life possible. “The school strictly enforced dress code, and required that all avatars be human, and of the same age and gender of the student.” (Pg. 28) The school had rules like the ones in the real world. That means that everyone even with all this overdose in people still get educated and rules are still taught and enforced and if not the students are disciplined. The real world was not a good place anymore it turned into a wasteland and it was overcrowded. “The real public school system, the one run by the government, had been an underfunded, overcrowded train wreck for decades.” (pg.31)
Its Real
Ernest Clyne makes the future feel like technology is the new living. Lives are in technology literally! Big games today that are free roam, large maps games allow you to create an avatar give it a name and live a very basic scaled life within that game. This book is that concept in a much larger scale.
The book up to the point thats been discussed is a Utopia in a sense of the future. It is very unhealthy because things like, exercise don’t really exist, and food is all in packets, pollution fills the air. But it allows people to almost go back in time where, they can enjoy the little things such as mrs. Gilmore go to church and Wade can hangout with his friend, and can get educated although he has no money. This utopia isn’t for the time being because its not a perfect world for the humans of today, but maybe someday it will be.
Make It Happen 