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“No giant two-headed hermaphrodite demon unicorn avatars were allowed. Not on school grounds , anyway.”
- Ready Player One
One thing that I promised myself that I would do in 2012 was Read. More. Books.
Seeing as I spend an inordinate amount of time waste-deep (…and I mean that) in Douthatnania and McArglebargle and Halperinanity, I thought I owed it to myself to occasionally get some joy out of reading what I actually want to read. Last year was kind of a lost year with not too much memorable or enjoyable (with the exceptions of James Wolcott’s Lucking Out, Brian Kellow’s Pauline Kael: A Life In The Dark, Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers and Tom Shone’s In The Rooms which I just finished the other day). The fact that I probably acquired about five books last year for every one that I actually got around to reading means I have quite the backlog to get through.
I was fortunate to start off the year with Ready Player One which is basically Charlie And The Chocolate Factory for gaming geeks and eighties nerds. I’ll let author Ernest Cline explain it all to you from over on John Scalzi’s blog:
I spent a lot of time thinking about the future of the internet and how it might evolve. I’d grown up reading science fiction novels like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, and I was still a recovering EverQuest addict. To me, it seemed inevitable that the Internet would eventually evolve into a three-dimensional space, a sprawling virtual reality that was part MMO and part social networking playground. But unlike in movies like The Matrix, I didn’t think humans would become unwitting prisoners inside this new virtual universe. Instead they would retreat into it knowingly and willingly, en masse, to escape the ever-growing troubles of the real world. Which doesn’t seem too different from the way we use the Internet now.
I was imagining what sort of person would create a virtual world on that scale, and then I remembered Warren Robinett’s first Easter egg. And that was when I got my Big Idea.
What if an eccentric video game designer, sort of a cross between Howard Hughes and Richard Garriott, created that ubiquitous virtual reality platform? And what if he decided to find a worthy successor for his company by turning his last will and testament into the greatest video game Easter Egg hunt of all time? It would be an epic treasure hunt, in a simulated universe that contained thousands of virtual planets. And those planets could be modeled after fictional worlds from other novels, films, comic books, and TV shows. It would be the ultimate storyteller’s sandbox.
The concept grabbed hold of me immediately and never really let go. I even had the perfect title, Ready Player One, taken from the message that used to appear on old coin-op video games. I began to fill notebook after notebook with ideas for scenes and characters, scribbling as fast as I could.
And when I started to ponder what sort of puzzles my eccentric video game designer would leave behind for his potential successors to try and solve, that was when I got my second Big Idea.
They tell first-time novelists to “write what you know.” Well, what I know about is being a huge geek. I grew up consuming mass quantities of science fiction novels, Dungeons and Dragons supplements, comic books, movies, and video games. And I never really outgrew any of it. Like most geeks of my generation, I still adore all of the pop culture of my youth.
What if the puzzles left behind by my eccentric billionaire nerd tested people’s knowledge of all the pop culture stuff he loved? It felt like a very geek thing to do. What could be a better power trip for a massive nerd than using your vast fortune to blackmail the entire world into studying and treasuring all of your favorite pop culture icons? It would be the character’s ultimate tribute to his obsessions, and would immortalize them for all time.
If you’re interested (and how could you not be?) boingboing has a downloadable pdf file of the first three chapters. It’s pure unadulterated fun to read. Highly recommended.
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Do the writers of Psych know about this book?
Don’t kid yourself, do you think in an actual rational world, Ross Douthat, Megan McArdle, and Mark Halperin would be considered serious public intellectuals?
Unwitting prisoners inside a virtual universe? You’re soaking in it.
Welcome to “Worse Than Life”. This can’t be real.
If you get a chance, check the new Neal Stephenson book, REAMDE. Virtual reality bizarro world…
Also too – to get serious in your reading, try Leningrad by Anna Reid. Reality reality, and almost too much reality. A hundred thousand people a month starving to death out of a city of three million?
Any Dragon’s Lair references? At fifty cents a play I could never afford to learn how to get through more than the first few screens but once I saw a five-year-old going to town on it. He had to stand on a chair to reach the controls.
Read it from the library (Go TampaHillsboroughPublicLibrary) & wond up buying a holiday gift copy for a 13YO son of a friend. Last we heard, he was still laughing.
The premise here sounds not completely unlike that of Chronic City, while Chronic City has the added advantage of featuring a middle-aged pothead eccentric named Perkus Tooth. You might want to check it out, too.
I have a copy of Chronic City already waiting. Love Lethem. I also have his The Ecstasy of Influence sitting on my desk begging to be read.
What a world. Who could dream that there would come a time when I can name two Lethem books I haven’t read yet? [note to self…]
I should have guessed. You strike me as a Chronic City kind of guy.
I can’t stop thinking about (and recommending, apparently) The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt. Do yourselves a favor, gentle Tboggians, and read this book. Best of the year, in my opinion.
Thus concludes my yearly comment at Tbogg…
I’d like to give a little shoutout to Dan and Tammie (Sunday Book Reviewers at Santorum’s favorite website Jesus General).
They do a great job on their Sunday reviews, can find just about any book you’re interested in reading and will toss in some of those pre-editions sent to reviewers/sellers with just about every order for free. I’ve read some really good stuff I wouldn’t have chosen because Dan/Tammie tossed it into the box….
Good peeps running an actual book store…
You had me at Atari 2600.
I hate to rain on anyone’s parade, but speaking as an actual game designer, Cline’s premise seems so far fetched as to be laughable. Game creation is such a collaborative process that it is extraordinarily difficult to squirrel anything away inside a game. Nothing stays hidden for long. And trawling source code and game data for information is pretty much a matter of grunt power. Just talk to the cracker community.
In chapter 1 of my version of Ready Gamer One a Russian coder would leak the easter egg on the internet and the game would be over three days before it is scheduled to start. The. End.
Next you’ll be telling us that Superman can’t really fly.
You bastard!
Writers have an odd response to games and gaming. I recall chatting with Iain M. Banks, the author of the Culture SF novels. He’d written a novel about a society whose philosophy, along with all its symbols and dynamics, was codified in a game. Only the game he’d described was so ferociously complex that the idea didn’t hold up. Any society based on it would experience a seizure. The truth is that complex games tend to be the worse vehicles to attach meaning to. If you want a game to be a metaphor for something, anything, you want a beautifully simple structure that you can project a philosophy onto, like Go. In fact Yasunari Kawabata wrote a wonderful book which does just that: Master of Go. I highly recommend it.