Worth reading, but with weaknesses - Review of 'Ready Player One'

The book “Ready Player One” had almost the potential to become an absolute classic on the scale of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

The author’s brilliant idea is to link 80s nostalgia with a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMO, MMOG) and make it the subject of a novel.

Warning: This review contains spoilers.

Many video games, films, and music bands from that era are mentioned here. I find the selection of video games to be good, the films less so, and the music rather not.

But that’s not so bad and would have clearly warranted 5 out of 5 stars. However, the author apparently couldn’t resist the temptation to include a few standard themes of social criticism, which are all too familiar from German television, for example, such as environmental pollution, racism (one of the heroes is an African-American lesbian who prefers to be male and white in the virtual world), and greedy corporations without morals. Of course, the role of the state in this is not questioned.

Even worse is that the protagonist, Parzival, goes through no character development. In the end, he has only risen from level 3 to level 99 in the virtual world. In the “Real World,” he somehow suddenly makes the leap from fat nerd to super agent, sneaking into a computer company’s high-security wing and spying on them. The challenges the hero has to overcome, on the other hand, are almost all connected to video games or puzzles. He doesn’t have to work on himself personally, overcome his fears, or improve. He solves problems by increasing his knowledge of the 80s or by improving his skills at playing 80s video games. It gets really bad when “Og” just appears out of nowhere, like a “Deus Ex Machina.”

At this point, I was really disappointed. It’s cheating when you just give the hero a supernatural friend to help him out.

All in all: worth reading, but with weaknesses.

Ernest Cline
Ready Player One
Kindle
2011