Ready Player One: Pages 0-99


99 pages into Ready Player One by Ernest Cline and I feel like I've been bombarded by the 80's. For a dystopian novel, Ready Player One seems to have more references to the past than the future it is set in. I'm impressed by the amount of research Cline must've had to do to find specific dates and titles for the novel.

After my initial 80's culture shock I thought a little bit harder about the main character and narrator Wade (Parzival). His status as highly intelligent gunter is valued only by his close friend Aech, mainly because he doesn't have the money to level up his avatar. Social class is valued within OASIS just as it is in the real world which is unfortunate for Wade who can't afford to use his knowledge to its full extent. The idea of having social classes within a virtual reality doesn't seem too far-fetched nowadays considering that some video games already use ranked systems and extreme gamers take their ranking or level very seriously.

Within this passage of reading it really stuck out to me that the narrator is portrayed as extremely intelligent, maybe even unrealistically so. From recognizing exact dates off the top of his head and memorizing lines from movies, he even was ahead in his latin class to the extent that it helped him find the Copper Key; "Hearing her repeat the phrase 'to learn' was enough to make me think of the limerick".  This almost unnatural ability to figure things out is bound to help Wade work through whatever the rest of the novel throws at him.

I'm looking forward to reading ahead and hoping to see more character interaction, and hopefully new characters to be introduced.







Comments

  1. Kaitlyn RugerSeptember 4, 2017 at 12:01 PM

    I agree with the fact that the main character is portrayed as an extremely intelligent person. I never really thought he was unrealistically intelligent until I read your feedback on how he heard the phrase "to learn" and instantly thought of the limerick. I think that was a little bit of a stretch. This blog post also made me realize how much work Ernest Cline had to put into this book. There's so many dates and references within the text that must've taken him a long time to write. I think Cline did a really good job wording the text as well, and I also feel like I got "bombarded by the 80's."

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  2. Robert FeldpauschSeptember 4, 2017 at 3:13 PM

    The fact that Wade does come off as unrealistically intelligent is one of my major gripes with the book as well. It just doesn't seem possible to become a complete expert of an entire decade in human history, in the few years since the hunt started. Even his main hindrance of being poor ends up turning into blessing due to the fact that because he is stuck waiting on Ludus, he is able to find the copper key. I think it sets a bad precedent for the rest of the story, where no matter how impossible the challenges seem, and should be, he will end up on top regardless.

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