Ready Player One is not a very good book. It is thin on original ideas, it has frustratingly simple prose and no sense of drama or pace. The overarching premise (A misanthrope genius game developer creates a world changing VR social space and bequeaths his fortune and total control to whomever succeeds at his challenge) could lead to interesting ideas about emulating celebrities' lives, living vicariously through them, or obsession with distractions limiting our development. Instead it's nothing more than a celebration of loving whatever it was you grew up with, which in the case of Ernest Cline seems to boil down to one sitcom, three films and a handful of cartoons.
A classic hero's quest might require the protagonist to learn and grow, to overcome challenges both from within and without or to reject the obvious path and forge something new. Ready Player One has nothing like that in mind. The first challenge needs a knowledge of one latin word, a map of a D&D module and some practice at Joust. Wade (or ParZival, as the 'gunting' community knows him) just so happens to be studying latin, have memorised and scanned that D&D module and practiced hours upon hours of Joust, all before turning 19, while attending school and having watched and memorised all 180 episodes of Family Ties, Star Wars, most John Hughes movies, a lot of anime, some Japanese Spiderman, and reading Stephen King, Douglas Adams, Vonnegut, Gaiman, and of course, the masterpieces of cinema created by Kevin Smith. Cline tries to suggest that 12 hours a day for four years would be enough for this most dedicated 'gunter' to absorb a literal decade of pop-culture but it feels like a cheap excuse for Cline simply having the internet to hand whenever he wanted to add a reference, with encyclopaedic notation ("Union of the Snake, I recited, mostly out of habit. Duran Duran. Nineteen Eighty Three" or "I recognised the opening riffs of 'Change' by John Waite. From the Vision Quest soundtrack. Geffen Records, 1985" or even "I recognised the song as 'Pour Some Sugar On Me' by Def Leppard, off their Hysteria album (Epic Records, 1987)").
Perhaps the book's worst sin is the rote recreations of opening scenes to movies Cline likes. This happens twice, once during the first challenge, where after playing Joust very well and then playing Dungeons of Daggorath very well, Wade must perform Matthew Broderick's role in Wargames word for word. There is no room for creativity or improvisation, the only way to prove your worth is to know the script to Wargames, and that's it. No purity of spirit, no courage, no grace or work ethic. Just watching the movie a few too many times beforehand, or having the screenplay read to you perhaps. The second time this challenge rears its head is even more frustrating, simply for being exactly the same challenge but now the player must know Monty Python's Holy Grail very well. And again, that's it. A comedy troupe famous for surprising the audience, subverting expectations and absolutely ignoring any semblance of expected comedy or storytelling are featured as something for Wade to quote word for word. We are treated to a full page of dialogue from Holy Grail before we are simply told he manages it perfectly, as any 'gunter' worth their salt should.
A close second for sins in RP1 is Cline's refusal to let the reader reach any conclusions or let the book carry any suspense before he blurts out the answer in the next line. Wade finally acquires the first key in the epic quest to unlock the treasure, and is worried that a rival gunter may kill him and take it. Four paragraphs later we are told this will never be an issue. The Oasis' entire virtual word occupies 27 cubes, arranged in a cube. This might put someone in mind of a Rubik's Cube. The following sentence tells us it resembles a Rubik's Cube.
These are just some of my thoughts on RP1's flaws. I could devote a lot more to the frankly problematic depiction of Shoto and Daito, two 'samurai' who are obsessed with 'honour', speak perfect English except for when they must say 'arigato' or call Wade 'Parzival-san' and recieve as little development as Ms Gilmore, an old lady neighbour who dies in the first third of the book. Or the bizarre swings between overdescriptions of attending a VR high school or what a vinyl record was, but the brushing off of a sci-fi gun battle as 'Like something out of a John Woo movie. One of the ones starring Chow Yun Fat', or his daring escape plan from the shadowy corporate headquarters as 'like something out of an old prison movie'. Or his mashing together of words that should carry a lot of weight and producing word-salads ('socializing with the twinked-out wannabe-gunter uberdorks' or 'sort of postapocalyptic cyberpunk girl-next-door look'). Or making a direct reference to Rivendell 'just like how it looked in the movies'. Or the 16 lines devoted to the importance of masturbation for lonely nerds. I feel compelled to keep going but I need to stop.
Ready Player One is not a good book.