Ready Player One Read-Through: Introduction

All you need to know from my Goodreads review:



After some time to calm down and soul search, I'm finally ready to do this.

I cannot remember if a book has ever made me this angry before. Maybe not since 'Hush, Hush' by Becca Fitzpatrick, and 'Bitten' by Kelley Armstrong, has a published piece of literature sent me into an inexplicable rage and all-consuming hatred not just of its content, but most importantly, its messages. Its dangerous, toxic messages.

Because 'Ready Player One' is toxic. And it should come with many trigger warnings.

It represents everything wrong and harmful not only in fandom today - not only in gaming and pop culture - but in our culture at large. Our still-frustratingly, predominately, oversaturated heterosexual white cisgender male culture and how it stubbornly persists in catering to that same niche group of the human race. 'Ready Player One' is a mirror into our internet and political age, and it does not look hopeful. In fact it seems content with the way things are right now; it enables issues such as bigotry, ignorance, male power fantasies, male entitlement, toxic masculinity, never growing up and accepting change, never being an adult, never facing reality, male fragility, and male violence.

And what makes it all worse is that most people I know - people who are feminists - love this book. They don't seem to realize or care that 'Ready Player One' is a "geek fantasy" that only caters to a very limited and exclusionary area of geek and pop culture fandom. Whose nostalgia is it for? Eighties white fanboys. Everything and everyone else don't matter - they don't exist according to this dystopia-that-doesn't-realize-it's-a-dystopia set in the 2040s. The eighties, with all its maleness and male power fantasy cliches, is the one true geek decade, according to the author of 'Ready Player One'. No one is allowed to disagree.

Doesn't that sound incredibly narrow-minded, immature, selfish, self-indulgent and elitist to you? Not to mention stunningly, stubbornly un-creative. The rise of the underdog story is not and never really has been anything new in storytelling, especially if the main characters are still white and mostly male, plus adding in token minorities with very little effort made to characterizing them. 

'Ready Player One' is ultimately about toxic nostalgia, and it doesn't even know it.

Now, I didn't grow up in the eighties, so that particular zeitgeist would escape me. But I would never claim that the nineties is the best decade ever and that it produced the best pop culture media ever just because I grew up at that time. I mean, everything would seem great when you are a kid: because everything was new to you then. What excuses this book? 

In my opinion, if you want to read a fun book about geeks and geek culture that manages to be up to date and takes seriously the toxic issues surrounding fandom - where straight, white and male are clearly not the default - I recommend reading 'Queens of Geek' by Jen Wilde instead. Heck, if you want a story that celebrates arcade games and gaming culture going back to the eighties, that at the same time acknowledges that gaming has evolved and become more inclusive since the basement-dwelling days of 1983, just watch 'Wreck-It-Ralph'.

I care about pop culture and positive representations in media being used as a vehicle for positive change in our society and politics. I consider myself a geek. That's one of the reasons why I care enough to rant about this popular book "for geeks". I consider it an offence against myself and everything I believe in.

'Ready Player One' has made me so angry, so upset, that I have decided to do something that I have never done before: I am going to do a chapter-by-chapter read-through of it on my blog, in an effort to clearly make my case everything wrong and harmful in it. I ended up using over 300 post-it stickers noting the problematic content. It may take a long time as I make updates, but hopefully I will be able to specifically make my point as I force myself through it all again. I am not doing it for myself, but for others - for people who have read the book and people who haven't, so that they can come to their own conclusions regarding the novel's content, based on what information I reveal.

Fuck this book and everything it stands for.



So yes, my project is about reading through the forty chapters of Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, and pointing out things in them that I view to be problematic. Feel free to disagree with me, as it is overall my personal opinion on the piece.

Disclosure: I have not seen the film adaptation by Steven Spielberg, nor do I want to see it anytime soon and give money to it. From what I could gather from the reviews I've seen and read, it looks like it could be better than the book, though not by much. Either way, I won't be comparing the film to the book in this read-through, because it is the book that I will be criticizing.

Also, I am not a gamer. I am more of a reader kind of geek, so expect no gaming insights from me here; no more than what the book tirelessly gives.

When it comes to the famous (or infamous, depending on how you look at it) references Ready Player One is known to make, I have not seen every single eighties movie ever, and I will not be pointing out all of them as they appear on a page, because that would make this experience even more tedious and self-indulgent than it already is, and I would like to come out of this with at least a significant bit of my sanity left intact.

Well, without further ado, lets dive headfirst into the exercise in eighties male-centered geek masturbation that is, Ready Player One.