Ready Player One Spielberg Have Fun Again

Steven Spielberg'south Ready Player One, an adaptation of the 2011 novel of the same proper name by Ernest Cline, is virtually to debut. And the internet is ready and waiting to tell him why that'south a terrible idea.

"Prepare Player I is a terrible book and it will be a terrible movie," the Outline proclaimed.

"Many people observe its have on games so-called genre fine art to exist a wearisome, pandering tableau of reference points as an finish unto themselves," the A.V. Club informed.

Reading the end of Prepare Player I, opined a writer for Tor, "I felt similar a child who thinks eating an unabridged cake by himself sounded fun — I was sick of it, and craving something of existent substance."

A time traveler from 2011 could be forgiven for being deeply confused past this response. In 2011, Set Player I was beloved. It was "a guaranteed pleasure." Information technology was "witty." It was non only "a simple fleck of fun" but likewise "a rich and plausible movie of future friendships in a world not also afar from our own."

What gives? How did the consensus on a single book get from "exuberant and meaningful fun!" to "everything that is wrong with the internet!" over the span of seven years?

Luckily, there's a perfect stepping stone that can aid united states of america understand exactly how this transition happened. In 2015, Cline released his 2nd book, Armada, to a reception that looked a lot closer to the consensus on Prepare Player I today than the consensus on Set up Thespian One in 2011. And that's considering in 2015, the geek community of the internet was yet in the throes of the seismic event known as Gamergate.

Gamergate was a toxic cultural battle filled with harassment so vicious it would become a major influence on the alt-right — but fundamentally, it was nigh who gets to be a geek, which parts of geek identity are worth lauding, and which parts are destructive. Gamergate changed the way we talk about geek culture, and in the terminate, information technology would make information technology borderline impossible to recall about books like Ready Thespian 1 as harmless, meaningless fun.

When Gear up Player One came out, information technology felt like an escapist fantasy for gamers

Warner Bros

Back in 2011, it was almost incommunicable non to think well-nigh Ready Player One as harmless fun.

The premise is appealingly silly and insubstantial: It's 2045, and the dystopian earth has go unbearable. As an escape, most of humanity spends its fourth dimension plugged into the OASIS, an expansive VR landscape that incorporates nigh of the 20th and 21st centuries' popular civilisation into itself, and then that users can pilot the spaceship from Firefly to a Dungeons & Dragons castle.

The plot is more than pleasant nonsense. The founder of the OASIS, James Halliday, has died, and he has left his fortune — and control of the Oasis itself — to the person who tin track downwards an Easter egg he's hidden within the game. To detect the egg, hunters (gunters, in the parlance of the book) will demand an encyclopedic cognition of Halliday'south beloved 1980s pop civilization. And our hero Wade, an 18-year-old video game addict from a trailer park, is sure that he's only the man to exercise it. He just has to find the egg before a massive corporation gets its easily on it instead, regulating abroad the freedom of virtual reality and ending the Oasis as Wade knows it.

What ensues is an exuberantly paced quest narrative that begs to exist devoured like candy and refuses whatever hard questions or contemplation on the reader's part. Why would you desire to think nigh how potentially toxic empty nostalgia can be? Ultraman's fighting Mechagodzilla over here!

The writing was never very adept — it's by and large just long lists of pop civilisation references and Wade's stance as to whether the property in question sucks or rocks — but for the kind of volume Ready Player I is trying to be, that doesn't necessarily thing. The primary aesthetic pleasure hither is one of recognition: Yep, I know that reference, and yep, I concord that it sucks or rocks. And Ready Player 1 is there to serve that pleasure to its readers on a silver platter — assuming its readers are likewise gamers obsessed with the bits of '80s pop culture that were built with teenage boys in heed.

But the master thing Ready Role player One is doing is telling those '80s-male child-culture-obsessed gamers that they matter, that in fact they are the most important people in the universe. That knowing every unmarried goddamn word of Monty Python and the Holy Grail can have life-or-death stakes, because why shouldn't information technology? (Yes, that is a crucial stride in Wade'due south battle to salve the OASIS.)

For readers in Cline's target demographic in 2011, that message felt empowering. For readers who weren't, it felt similar a harmless piece of affirmation meant for someone else. Everyone deserves a featherbrained escapist fantasy, right? And since Cline'due south silly escapist fantasy wasn't specifically meant for girls — unlike, say, Twilight, which was getting savaged in pop culture at the time — Ready Player One was largely left alone by the people information technology wasn't built for. In that location was the occasional harsh slice of criticism from the in-group, but generally, the response was welcoming. Even the New York Times, which noted that "gaming has overwhelmed everything else about this book," gave information technology a gentle, mostly positive review.

4 years afterward, Armada came out to a very different reaction.

Past the fourth dimension Armada came out, Cline'due south escapism had come to seem toxic

Olivia Cooke and Tye Sheridan equally Wade and Art3mis in Set up Player One

Warner Bros.

Armada, similar Prepare Player One, is primarily a delivery mechanism for geek nostalgia and geek affirmation, merely in this case information technology's focused on alien invasion stories rather than just '80s popular culture. (Although this chief graphic symbol, like Set Player One's Wade, does have an anachronistically encyclopedic knowledge of '80s stuff.) It takes the premise that the video game manufacture is actually a hush-hush government strategy meant to train civilians to fight against an alien invasion — so when the aliens come, gamers are the homo race's all-time promise of survival.

Over the course of the book's first act, 18-year-old Zack Lightman goes from nerdy high school gamer to a captain in the Earth Defense Brotherhood, adored past all for his video game prowess and provided with non only his favorite snacks and gaming music but also a especially bred strain of weed designed specifically for gaming. "All those years I spent playing videogames weren't wasted afterward all, eh?" he crows to his female parent. (Cline loves the word eh. His characters all sound vaguely Canadian because of it.)

The aesthetic pleasance here is the same as it was in Ready Player I — "I get that reference!" — and so is the fundamental thought: that gamers have the potential to be the most important people in the universe. But in 2015, readers no longer welcomed such pleasures with universally open arms.

The Washington Post dismissed information technology as "cornball narcissism." The A.5. Order found it "depressing." Armada was a dull retread of Set Player Ane, critics opined, filled with off-putting nerd gatekeeping and lists of better and more interesting stories instead of any original ideas of its ain.

"It'south as though Willy Wonka made you prove you lot knew the chemic composition of nougat earlier he let you into the chocolate mill," The Verge complained.

The most often-cited and securely damning Armada review was at Slate, past Laura Hudson (now an editor at Vox'southward sister site The Verge). "The shameless, jejune wish-fulfillment of the book burns hot and bright," she wrote, arguing that Fleet was "cringingly terrible and transparent" in its "self-indulgence," and that Cline's condition as the apotheosis of nerd culture "should be troubling to anyone who identifies with the label."

For Hudson, the empty nerd nostalgia that Cline's work champions points to something toxic in nerd culture itself. "Information technology'south a valuable question for gaming civilisation — and 'nerd culture' more generally — to ask itself," she wrote: "Practice nosotros want to tell stories that make sense of the things we used to love, that assistance us call up the reasons we were so fatigued to them, and create new works that inspire that level of devotion? Or do we simply desire to hear the litany of our childhood repeated dorsum to us like an endless lullaby for the rest of our lives?"

Hudson doesn't mention Gamergate by proper noun, but that'southward the elephant in the room here. Gamergate is why the toxicity of nerd culture is a more-than-reasonable peg for a review of a book like Armada in 2015. It's why, at the fourth dimension, people were thinking a lot nigh the toxicity of nerd culture in general. And it's why, four years after the debut of Prepare Histrion One, it was no longer easy to think of Cline's cornball, nerdy fantasies as harmless.

Gamergate is most gatekeeping. So is Prepare Thespian One.

The Iron Giant in Set Player One

Warner Bros.

Gamergate's origins are nebulous and contradictory, equally ably outlined past my colleague Todd VanderWerff. What's important for the Ready Player Ane conversation is what Gamergate had evolved into by 2015, and that is: angry gamers (mostly young, straight white men) hurling abuse at their targets (mostly women) in the proper noun of a kind of nerd purity.

That corruption took the form of graphic rape and expiry threats, sometimes so detailed and specific that some of the women targeted by Gamergate went into hiding. Occasionally, Gamergaters would transport SWAT teams to their targets' homes (a popular trolling tactic that has led to expiry in at least one instance).

It was all a particularly fell and brutal kind of gatekeeping. Gamergate's targets were primarily people who were interested in performing feminist critiques of video games or in making nontraditional video games for women or disabled people or people of color. For this, packs of angry nerds decided that they must be punished.

Culture writers who think a lot about nerd culture were deeply shaken. They started to write think pieces near how nerd culture could have become so deeply toxic, and then profoundly misogynistic and destructive, that information technology could nascence a motility like Gamergate.

"There's a key lack of empathy or agreement for other human beings at play here," argued Andrew Todd at Birth Movies Death. "These people live in a fucked-upward alternate universe where everything is done for the lulz, or to win points in some kind of psychopathic game of 1-upmanship. What we're seeing is the gamification of a social struggle."

At Destructoid, Jonathan Holmes pointed the finger at "the sentiment of elitism. The thought that there are certain kinds of gamers that deserve to take pride in that name, and others that should exist aback. The procedure of establishing superiority over some other grouping of gamers past belittling them."

"Past the plow of the millennium," wrote Leigh Alexander at Gamasutra, the cultural imperatives of gaming were: "Accept money. Take women. Get a gun and so a bigger gun. Be an outcast. Celebrate that. Defeat anyone who threatens you. Yous don't need cultural references. You don't need anything simply gaming." Those imperatives, she concluded, would create "an amorphous cultural shape that was dark and loud on the exterior, hollow on the inside."

And unfortunately for Cline, his work reads like a compendium of all the aspects of nerd culture that critics have come see as a breeding footing for Gamergate.

How Gamergate killed Fix Histrion One

A scene from Set up Thespian One

Warner Bros.

Both Wade and Zack follow Alexander's imperatives like they're checking them off a list: They start off poor but and then make millions from their video games. They earn absurd hacker girlfriends like trophies. They get guns, and so bigger guns. Their cultural references are valuable purely for their apply in gaming — any culture that exists exterior of their video games might as well not exist. And gleefully, they celebrate their outcast condition.

"I was too weird, fifty-fifty for the weirdos," Wade announces at the offset of Ready Player 1. His school doesn't "get" him, so he heads to the Oasis. There, his '80s pop culture cognition ensures his loftier social status, and his debates with his best friend — over which '80s properties stone and which suck — are considered "loftier in entertainment value." When a beau player dares to question his noesis, Wade is able to beat out him into submission under a stream of trivia ("You lot're property Swordquest: Earthworld. … Tin you name the adjacent three games in the series?") until his rival "lowers his caput in shame" and the watching, awestruck oversupply "bursts into applause."

The world of Cline'due south escapist fantasy is a globe of elitist gatekeeping. It is a world in which a person'southward value is determined past their cognition of esoteric cultural trivia, where those of bottom value must exist defeated and wiped away, and where gaming is all that matters. And, crucially, it is a globe specifically for directly white men.

Cline'south cultural references are all aimed at boys. The pop culture of the '80s that's built for girls — like Jem and the Holograms or The Baby -S itters Club or the American Girl dolls — has no place hither.

Can you imagine how shittily men would treat Ready Player I if it was all femme stuff?

"I arrived in my flying model of the Thelma & Louise machine. I'd installed a Polly Pocket dashboard AI, and, to complete the look, slapped some Lisa Frank dolphins on the outside" pic.twitter.com/oAl6V2jSJD

— jane frie(n)dhoff (@JFriedhoff) December 11, 2017

There are girls in his universe. Wade'south all-time friend has a white male avatar but is secretly a black lesbian, a revelation to which Wade reacts by deciding that it does non matter considering he doesn't even see people's race, gender, or sexuality. It'south a passage that reads remarkably like the "I don't intendance if you're black, white, green, or regal" oral communication, and that carries the same basic problem: Wade should care that his best friend is a black lesbian because those are important facts about his best friend'southward life. But in this world, they're unimportant, because simply things that bear upon straight white dudes really matter.

And then there'southward Art3mis, Wade's beloved involvement. Art3mis is as flat as a paper doll, a character who exists only as a prize who will advantage Wade when he proves his masculinity. Sure, we're told that she'due south potent and smart and a dandy gamer — merely she's never immune to be such a good gamer that she poses a real threat to Wade. Her gaming skills are but proficient enough to make her a worthy prize for our hero, unlike other girls, who we are given to understand are empty-headed and vain. (Wade is forever comparing the avatars of other girls unfavorably to Art3mis's effortless cool, an attitude y'all tin can encounter repeated in some of Cline's erstwhile verse.)

And Wade wins her by hunting. Art3mis repeatedly tells Wade that she'south not interested in a romantic human relationship, but Wade wears her downward in the end by sheer force of his squeamish-guy persistence. "She's basically a NPC [non-thespian character]," concludes Beth Elderkin at io9.

All of these issues may have seemed trivial or unimportant pre-Gamergate — but by 2015, that was no longer the case. Now, they were all many critics could run across when they looked at Cline's work. What used to seem fun and frothy and harmless in Ready Player 1 was dead; Gamergate killed it.

To be off-white to Cline, at no point does his work endorse harassing women or minorities or suggest that Gamergate was a super-adept thought that's just been tragically misunderstood. So to some readers, the persistent association of his work with Gamergate seems to be both a stretch and fundamentally unjust. Why can't they just read a fun dumb fantasy about gamers saving the world without feeling like they're somehow endorsing rape threats?

"Hey, guess what?" wrote Chris Meadows at TeleRead. "Many of us who abhor Gamergate are nonetheless gamer nerds ourselves, and we really tin can savor reading about video gamers existence depicted every bit awesome while still feeling that women are people and worthy of respect, too."

And of course you tin read Ready Histrion One every bit a fun dumb fantasy. No ane'southward stopping you! Simply Cline's earth is not simply one in which gamers get to be crawly, simply also one in which gamers go to be awesome specifically because anybody else sucks. It'southward a world in which women are trophies, the concerns of straight white men are all that matters, and the greatest possible calling of anyone'south life is the rote memorization of trivia at the expense of all else.

Cline does gesture at the idea that there is a world outside of video games. Wade is briefly humiliated and depressed past the life he'south congenital for himself — one of total isolation, in which he never leaves his crappy apartment with its blacked-out windows considering he's too busy searching for Halliday's egg. And when he encounters Halliday's avatar in the Haven, Halliday passes on some words of wisdom to him: "Equally terrifying and painful as reality tin be," he says, "it'south also the simply place where you tin find true happiness. Considering reality is real."

But the moment reads every bit lip service, because Ready Player 1's heart has no time for the earth outside of video games, not actually. It's likewise decorated nerding out over how freakin' cool it is that Ultraman is fighting Mechagodzilla and a kid is saving the give-and-take by reciting every goddamn word of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

And in a pre-Gamergate world, the sheer glee and fun of moments like that were enough to make the dark underbelly of the fantasy disappear and carry Ready Thespian I to the heights of cultural phenomena. Just postal service-Gamergate, the dark underbelly has become all too credible. The fun isn't quite enough to carry the volume anymore — so now the onus is on Spielberg'south forthcoming motion picture to overcome its Gamergate baggage.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/3/26/17148350/ready-player-one-book-backlash-controversy-gamergate-explained

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