Ready Player One Read-Through: Chapter 11

Wade leaps into the abyss of the unknown, with no idea of where he's going and whether he can ever return, and comes to as a character in a movie. Seriously.

He is in a fully-interactive game - or, an interactive movie game. He is actually in the movie, Wargames, and he is playing Matthew Broderick's character, the main lead David Lightman.


Everything looked and sounded exactly as it did in the movie. Halliday had copied every last detail from the film and re-created it as an interactive simulation
      Holy shit. (Page 108-109)


No kidding. The author goes to great lengths to detail the appearance and the sets of the scenes in Wargames. Bet he's glad to know that all that research and endless watching had paid off in the end.


Wargames had been one of Halliday's all-time favorite movies. Which was why I had watched it over three dozen times. Well, that, and also because it was completely awesome, with an old-school teenage computer hacker as the protagonist. And it looked like all of that research was about to pay off. (Page 109)


1. Over three dozen times?! How are you alive, Wade? All that reading and playing hundreds of games and watching hundreds of films and television shows over and over again, for hours and hours, over the course of five years, at your young age - are you sure you're not an AI yourself?

2. At least in regards to this pop culture reference Wade mentions that he likes something Halliday did (and not just because Halliday liked it), and gives a reason as to why, lame and cliched as that reason is.

3. "an old-school teenage computer hacker as the protagonist" isn't unique or special in a Hollywood movie from the eighties. Especially when that protagonist is straight, white and male.

4. I knew that the author would be not-so-subtly self-congratulating himself in the text, judging from that last line.

Wade also finds out that he is trapped here, in this standalone simulation away from the OASIS, unless he completes the level - meaning, unless he completes the whole movie, acting just as Broderick did in it: saying his lines, using the exact same inflections and tones he used, or it's game over. Less fun and more horror film scenario, in my opinion.

Any scene without Broderick, he just has to sit it through - to watch and enjoy for the fortieth time, or the one-hundred-and-fortieth.

And call it nitpicking, but Broderick's character in Wargames doesn't appear in the film until 13.55 minutes in, which is when Wade is dropped into the simulation. I'd hardly call a movie where the protagonist doesn't even show up for nearly fourteen minutes after it starts a great classic. Maybe it only has nerd nostalgic worth. By and by, that's only my opinion.

The prize for completing the simulation with high points is the clue to the next key to the egg, the Jade Key. No prizes for guessing how Wade fares in this bizarre game/Saw-like prison of Halliday's, however. Yeah, he aces it on the first try, no problem, once he gets into it at the beginning. What did you expect? He's an invincible Gary Stu with no life. Life points, but no life.

He runs to his character's school:


My mind was racing as I ran inside. If all I had to do was rattle off lines of dialogue from  Wargames on cue for the next two hours, this was going to be a breeze. Without even knowing it, I'd totally overprepared. I probably knew Wargames even better than I knew Real Genius and Better Off Dead. (Page 110)


Tension? Suspense? Investment? What are they?

If everything comes easy for the hero, no matter the situation, then why should the audience care about them? Is Wade meant to be a blank slate for the reader to project themselves onto, like Bella Swan? Imagining themselves to be this much of a successful young nerd, using pop culture knowledge to literally save the world? He's hardly someone I'd want to emulate, however.

His visor continuously warns him that he is going to be late for class. In a smarter book, this could be a clever intersection: between the class in the movie simulation, and the class in Wade's actual OASIS school, which by now we know there's not a chance he's going to be attending after this, dying of sleep deprivation, cold and starvation as he's going to be. He could ace this "fake, movie" class, but fail or otherwise get into "real" trouble in his "real" school.

But no. There are no negative consequences for him neglecting his education. Halliday and the egg hunt are Wade Watts's worthless future.

He explains how he won the game/movie in passive narration. There is mention of the future from where he is narrating; where there will be a new type of video game - called Flicksyncs, which involves people getting the chance to play any role in a simulation of their favourite films. It sounds genuinely fun, but will it be a part of the OASIS? Wouldn't it cause even more problems with people becoming addicted to games, where they would actually have to spend up to two hours or more exhaustively reenacting a movie, line for line, action by action?

Wade gets to the final scene, where Broderick ends up teaching a WOPR supercomputer that nearly brings about a nuclear war because of a game, "the only winning move is not to play". If only the OASIS and the author of Ready Player One had followed that reasoning.


I, David Lightman, a teenage computer geek from suburban Seattle, had single-handedly prevented the end of human civilization. (Page 112)


1. David was also the one who caused the government computer to see nuclear war as a game, with his hacking, in the first place. But let's not mention that; gotta milk all that hero worship!

2. Wade is playing this character in this scene - and the above declaration also serves as a foreshadowed bragging of his own triumphs in the book.

3. Geeks are heroes! Geeks save the world! As if this was ever questioned. This isn't news, this isn't an underdog story, as much as Cline, writing this in 2011, likes to think it is.

While I don't want any further description of the film in a text already littered with pop culture references - it is a novel, not an essay, after all - showing a little more understanding of Wargames, exploring its themes and messages, critiquing it but loving it all the same, would have been nice. There is still not much love for the source coming through that well. All this chapter really tells me is that Halliday is pathetic - more so than I thought before, and I hadn't thought that was possible! - and Wade is an exhaustive, hollow shell of a human being; a puppet of Halliday's, with no will, interests, ideas, or a personality of his own.

The puppet clears the First Gate. The riddle to the Jade Key is revealed to him. He has now been awake and logged in the OASIS for over twenty-four hours.

He gets back to Halliday's house in Middletown, then back on the planet Ludus, where he finally logs out of the OASIS. It only took him ten chapters to do it. He does realize how cold it's gotten, and he wraps himself up in a sleeping bag and has a kip.

What follows next is a rather well-written dream sequence, where Wade is in a scorched battlefield, a toy sword in one hand, the Easter egg in the other, and he is wearing paper armour. He is helpless as a rampaging, angry army of gunters charges at him, ripping him to shreds as they fight to take the egg for themselves.

It is clearly a nightmare, and a believable one at that. I can easily picture it. It also, in one perfect image, symbolizes everything wrong about this contest and the horrifying implications of Halliday's grand plan.

Too bad it is never mentioned again. It amounts to nothing more than a pointless cliche of a nightmare sequence to end the chapter.

Next chapter, get ready for further reasons to hate all the characters in this book!