Ready Player One by Ernest Cline *****

It is 2044 and VR has come to MMORPGs. The richest person in the world, James Halliday, owns the dominant video game: OASIS – Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation. He has just died and willed his empire to whoever finds the hidden Easter egg. Halliday loves the 1980s, so coin-op video games, John Hughes films, Commodore-64, TRS-80, and all 1980s music is important. Parzival is a teenage boy set on winning the prize.

The good players are Parzival, his friend Aech, Art3mis who he believes he is in love with, and two Japanese brothers. Of course, these people only know each other through their online avatars. Things like appearance, age, gender, race, etc. are unknown and unknowable. The bad players represent IOI – Innovative Online Industries. They are well funded, well connected, and, of course, evil.

The book is full of trivia from the 1980s, real-world computing, and MMOPRG gaming.

For example, IOI and other well-funded players on the quest for the Easter egg are located in Ohio where the OASIS servers are located. This is done to minimize the network latency. This is a real-world issue. Big electronic trading operations co-located with the stock exchange servers for the same reason.

Within the game, the jargon matches that of role-playing games probably starting back with Dungeons and Dragons. Buffs, hit points, paper dolls, inventory, spells, levels… Many of the plot problems hinge on familiar game dynamics. Is this a PvP area? Is my best weapon on cooldown? When will the quest reset?

The book falls into two roughly-equal parts. The first part is the preliminary quests. This part is very heavy on 1980s popular culture with long lists of films, songs, video games, personal computers, etc. I found this became boring and eventually I skipped over these.

The second part is the final battle, good versus evil. This was well done and continually surprising… until the expected ending.

If you are interested in history, specifically the history of computers, video games, or 1980s popular culture... If you play MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft or Everquest… you’ll enjoy Ready Player One by Ernest Cline for the extensive trivia and the excitement of the quest.