Shifty Reads Ready Player Two, Part 1

Ernest Cline wrote a Ready Player One sequel.

The time is right.

Ready Player One is actually one of my favourite books to talk about, if not to read, because it is genuinely fascinating in how it fails. It's bad for all the reasons people have talked about, of course - the agonising nostalgia wank, the regressive attitude to fandom, the weak plot, the misogyny and orientalism, etcetera, you've read the takedowns and I needn't elaborate further. But the book also struck me as having a weird identity crisis, where it couldn't decide whether it was pure nostalgia wank or actually trying to immerse people in its world who weren't so familiar with the source material. It'd rattle off lists of geek media, and you could just feel the reaction it was trying to bait, a kind of "I understood that reference" hat-tip like a boomer listening to We Didn't Start The Fire, but then it'd pull its punches and handhold and explain itself in places, as if preempting accusations of gatekeeping. It felt like the book was failing at doing the very thing it was being critiqued for.

So when I heard that Cline was putting out a sequel, my first thought was, verbatim, spoken aloud to nobody in particular in my bedroom at 1:30am, "oh no, I'm going to have to read this". What really spurred me on, though, was Googling the book's name this afternoon and finding the following two headlines, side by side:

Ready Player Two: The Sequel's Best Easter Eggs and References

Ready Player Two Review: Ernest Cline's Soulless Sequel Beats a Dead Horse

These two pieces are from the same site.

Doing a "let's read" of this particular book comes with some caveats, because passages from Ready Player Two have been flagged as copyright infringement and DMCA'd off Twitter over the last few days (amusingly, this provides an easy way to tell real excerpts from jokes, which is sometimes tricky). Thus, I'm going to be very sparing in directly quoting RP2. I'm taking this as an opportunity, because, rather than focusing on individual snippets of bad writing and "cringey" lines, this will make me step back and consider the book a little more as a whole.

This series comes with a blanket spoiler warning for both RP2 and its prequel, though I can't imagine you care much if you've read this far. Also, strong language throughout. Okay? Okay. Let's go.

A Brief Recap of RP1

RP1 is the story of Wade Watts, aka Parzival, a teenager living in the far future of the 2040s, where an energy crisis has ruined the world - but not so badly that most inhabitants can't access sufficient power for full-immersion VR tech. Wade lives and attends school in a huge MMO / virtual world called the OASIS, whose creator has died and left a series of cryptic clues. The trail leads to an Easter egg which grants both money and total control of the OASIS, but the clues rely on detailed knowledge of 80s pop culture, which everyone in the dystopian future is now obsessed with. Through grit, determination, and having more nerd clout than everyone else, Wade teams up with some rival Easter egg hunters, outwits an evil debt-slaver corporation that's also looking for the egg, claims it, and kisses the cute gamer girl. I think that covers it.

Cutscene

We begin in Columbus, Ohio, where Wade is settling into his new office. He now co-owns GSS, the company behind the OASIS, alongside the remaining heroes from the previous book. We get a brief exposition dump of what's happened to all those major players, and learn that, among other things, Samantha / Art3mis, the aforementioned cute gamer girl, is moving in with Wade in a few days.

Our hero logs back into the OASIS, where the people he resurrected after their deaths in RP1's final battle are waiting to greet him. But Wade is an aloof king, and doesn't seem interested in mingling with the rabble, so he teleports up to a secret room in the castle he's taken over from Halliday, the world's creator. He notices an inscription on the Easter egg he found (a literal silver egg), and immediately realises that it leads to a real-world secret somewhere in the GSS building, so he logs out and runs to find it. The clues are the number 42, probably the most entry-level Hitchhiker's Guide reference it's possible to make, and the phone number from Tommy Tutone's "Jenny". We're less than three pages in, by the way; the references start thick and fast.

The prize is a real, physical version of the in-game egg, which contains what appears to be a new prototype VR headset and a hologram message from Halliday - the real Halliday, not the avatar that appeared to Wade in the previous book. He explains that this headset is a direct neural interface, the ONI, which, on top of direct neurosensory I/O with the OASIS, can record and play back sensory experiences. Wade notes that this feels like the stuff of science fiction - so this is cutting edge even by in-universe standards.

Except, this passage features a clumsy aside about how brain-computer interfaces do already exist, and are a huge benefit for physically disabled people. This feels like Cline's retort to accusations that the world of RP1 felt smug and unwelcoming, trying to inject some diversity into his writing, and he's done it in a way that directly undercuts the plot point he's trying to push.

The message tells Wade that it's up to him whether or not to release the technology, because Halliday apparently doesn't know whether it will do good or evil. I'm struggling to think of a scenario where the downsides of perfect, widely available brain-computer interfacing outweigh the upsides, especially in a world where VR is such a huge deal and especially for those disabled people Cline definitely cares about now, but okay.

At first, Wade thinks this is all some practical joke, but he takes the thing back to his office and reads the documentation on his PC. Despite some reservations, he decides to test it out, and powers it up. We get a dump of safety information, then login, then a transcript of a warning message with mostly the same safety information. The passphrase is "Everybody wants to rule the world".

Past the warning screens, the welcome message flashes up, and we have title, and the start of what I assume is the book proper.

0000

We get a brief explanation of how full multisensory VR is, in fact, full and multisensory. It's like you're inside the game, yo. Wade tests it out by stroking a table, which feels like a real table, and eating some fruit, which tastes like real fruit. He also discovers that you feel significantly less pain than you ought to, though your avatar can still take HP damage. He flies around for a bit (and it feels like he's really flying!), and tests out some static VR demos recorded by other people, noticing that he feels like he's inhabiting their bodies but can't control the experience.

Then the book makes me laugh out loud for the first time, because Wade stops at the sex recordings, which are named as follows:

• SEX-M-F.oni
• SEX-F-F.oni
• SEX-Nonbinary.oni

Ah yes, the three types of sexual pairings! M/F, F/F, and nonbinary! I love that Cline gives nonbinariness a token shout-out but apparently doesn't have the guts to mention male/male sex. Diversity!

Wade doesn't try any of them - not even SEX-Nonbinary.oni, which I'm still laughing at as I write this - because it'd feel like cheating on Samantha.

Wade logs out and reads some more documentation, and we get another exposition dump. Halliday devised the ONI through an R&D lab with the goal of improving accessibility to the OASIS for physically disabled people. Several real, extant devices came out of this lab, but Halliday gave them away for free because he was the good kind of tech magnate, see, not one of the bad ones. In parallel with these, the same lab was also developing ONI, but Halliday shut it down just as it was about to go to market and laid off everyone at the lab, with the redundancy packages including NDAs. See, Halliday knew that the only way to make sure the invention was used for good, not evil, was to give it to the winner of a convoluted 80s trivia quiz.

None of this makes much sense, but I guess it's an interesting setup for a slower, talkier story, where the new co-owners debate what to do with the technology - Wade has mentioned that Art3mis probably won't like it, for example - and maybe they're threatened by industrial espionage or potential bad actors or something like that. Just kidding! The debate is resolved, and Wade and friends release the ONI to the world. Everyone buys the ONI and GSS makes a ton of money. This all happens over the course of three paragraphs. Yep, this whole section is still the prologue.

Then the ONI hits 7,777,777 concurrent users, and a cryptic poem appears on Halliday's website. The poem seems to reference Halliday's business partner's dead wife, whom Halliday loved but could never pursue. And it hints at a second Easter egg somewhere in the OASIS.

We're actually just doing RP1 again.

Fuck.

Timeskip. The ONI sells to two thirds of the population of the world. The evil debt-slaver corporation from RP1 gets bought out and all the indentured servants are freed. Total VR and memory playback turn this dystopia into a utopia, because I guess escaping the real world basically counts as making it better. For some reason, there's a whole paragraph about the ONI's anti-piracy measures, and they're spun as an unambiguous positive, because nothing's cooler than a corporate monopoly. This sort of unquestioning neoliberal optimism about the role of capital in media is something I'm going to keep an eye on through the rest of the book, because it's a hallmark of the kind of nerd culture Cline appeals to and I want to see if he challenges it at all. My hopes are not high.

For some goddamn reason, it becomes trendy to record yourself giving birth so you can play back the memory to your children when they're older. This comes so far out of nowhere, makes so little sense, and raises so many questions about why Cline thought of this or decided to include it in his book, that I'm just going to ignore it and hope it goes away.

But there's trouble in paradise. Wade isn't happy - he's still addicted to the OASIS, even more so this time, and that damn riddle, the Seven Shards riddle, still plays on his mind. He offers a bounty of a billion dollars to anyone who can find one of the titular shards for him, and a new generation of egg hunters ("gunters", in the book's parlance, which still feels like some sort of sexual pejorative to me) rises to look for them.

Okay. It's 2048. We get a brief interlude from Halliday's book, Anorak's Almanac, and then our first real chapter, which, I assume, will be about tearing apart this perfect life Wade and friends have built for themselves.

And on that note, I'll call it here. I'm going to shoot for two chapters per installment, and the next will probably be out this weekend. Catch you then.