Ready Player One Read-Through: Chapter 22

PAC-MAN!



Ahem.



Wade lands on Archaide, which resembles the Death Star from an Atari Star Wars game, as well as other pixellated Atari games from the eighties. More references and cites to eighties songs. Arcade games are located beneath the surface of the planet - there are thousands of them, in fact, with levels. Like a labyrinth of eighties archive games. Unfortunately there's no Minotaur-type opponent or guardian anywhere, because that would add conflict and make things interesting.

There are pages dedicated to infodumping and listing a lot of these classic coin-operated games. And of course Wade and other gunters had come here before.

This chapter is ALLLLLLLLLLLLL about fifties-to-eighties game nostalgia.

Blah blah blah, Wade spots a pizza place in the labyrinth/museum/arcade and computer game porn shop, which no one else had apparently seen before. Lucky him, eh? Halliday had programmed the pizza place in there, as a replica of one of his favourite places as a kid, and it is mentioned "several times in the Almanac".

Wait, how did no other gunter find it there, then?

Pizza! This is a nerd fantasy chapter.

Still no Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reference, there?

I'm getting offtrack, I'm sorry. This is rather dull.

What else is there to talk about?

The pizza joint even has video games set in its tables.

A Bryan Adams song plays.

Then Wade plays a perfect game of Pac-Man.

As well as listing off classic arcade and computer games, chapter 22 is about Wade playing Pac-Man.

He opens up his "grail diary and pulled up all the Pac-Man--related data I'd ever collected." Such data includes:


Every episode of the Pac-Man cartoon series. The ingredients for Pac-Man cereal. And, of course, patterns. I had Pac-Man pattern diagrams out the wazoo, along with hundreds of hours of archived video of the best Pac-Man players in history. I'd already studied a lot of this stuff, but I skimmed over it again now to refresh my memory. Then I closed my grail diary and studied the Pac-Man machine in front of me, like a gunfighter sizing up an opponent. (Page 222)


How riveting.

I should have expected an entire chapter dedicated to everything Pac-Man in Ready Player One. What I'm most impressed by is that it managed to restrain itself until over halfway into the "story".

There's even data on the Pac-Man cereal! Again with cereal! What use is that info anywhere in the book - in anything? Other than to remind the reader that it existed? That Halliday really loved Pac-Man?

Speaking of, guess who accomplished the fastest, most perfect game of Pac-Man of all time? Yep, our geek dictator himself.

Wade had studied everything Pac-Man - everything that Halliday liked - because he has no life and mind of his own. It's all about whatever useless junk that the world's richest loner and loser liked, all to one day own a virtual reality world that might be fun, but is still fake. And addictive and where practically everybody's time and money is spent. The OASIS is a distraction from the real world and its problems.

The last few pages are about Wade beating Halliday's world record score on Pac-Man. Because you knew he would play a perfect game with hardly any trouble. If I wanted to read a book about someone playing a game and describing it as they got along, I wouldn't: I'd just play a game myself. It isn't the same just reading about it.

It takes Wade six hours to play. The more I think about this chapter -and there really isn't a lot to think about - the more I realize that the whole novel is like a slightly more sophisticated version of the Adam Sandler film Pixels.

PAC-MAN!

When he wins, he receives a quarter. That's it. That's all he gets out of it. It's a macguffin for much later on - near the end of the book, to be precise. This chapter has nothing to do with finding the Jade Key. It is mostly another gaming geek masturbation detour.

I know I should be mad, but I'm barely keeping awake as I read the chapter and then type up this blog post.

The Scoreboard also revealed during the gameplay that Aech had found the Jade Key.


But at the moment, I was having a hard time caring all that much about the the mystery of the undroppable quarter. All I could think about was that Aech and Art3mis had both beaten me to the Jade Key. And getting the high score on this Pace-Man game on Archaide obviously hadn't gotten me any closer to finding it myself. I really had been wasting my time here. (Page 224)


And wasting the reader's time as well.

I am actually reading a book where the main character plays Pac-Man for the majority of a chapter, in a seemingly pointless scene. The obtained quarter coin won't come back until chapter 36.

The SNL sketch, hardly a footnote in chapter 17, is officially justified.

So Wade heads to the surface of the planet and goes back into the Vonnegut, where he receives a clue from Aech via email. He now knows where to go next. Easy! Gotta make sure this wasn't completely pointless!

But why would Aech help Wade now, when they hadn't spoken in months? And Wade hasn't apologized yet? Is it for the better that less Sixers arrive and take copies of the Jade Key? But wouldn't that be leading Wade right into their path and into his possible demise? Is Aech, in fact, setting a trap for him, his competitor for the egg?

Nah! Bros before pros, bros before hos - bros always.

Well, that was exciting, wasn't it?

Not sure how or why I even made this chapter post as long as it is.



PAC-MAN!