Amph Ready Player One- book and film discussion thread

Oh well apparently there will be SW in RPO

 

Referencing Things: The Movie adds more references. This is great news.

 

Is the prose in the novel possibly as turgid as this parody makes it seem?



I can't accept someone would publish something like that.

 

Here's the original text:


The Almanac contained thousands of references to Halliday’s favorite books, TV shows, movies, songs, graphic novels, and videogames. Most of these items were over forty years old, and so free digital copies of them could be downloaded from the OASIS. If there was something I needed that wasn’t legally available for free, I could almost always get it by using Guntorrent, a file-sharing program used by gunters around the world.

When it came to my research, I never took any shortcuts. Over the past five years, I’d worked my way down the entire recommended gunter reading list. Douglas Adams. Kurt Vonnegut. Neal Stephenson. Richard K. Morgan. Stephen King. Orson Scott Card. Terry Pratchett. Terry Brooks. Bester, Bradbury, Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Vance, Gibson, Gaiman, Sterling, Moorcock, Scalzi, Zelazny. I read every novel by every single one of Halliday’s favorite authors.

And I didn’t stop there.


I also watched every single film he referenced in the Almanac. If it was one of Halliday’s favorites, like WarGames, Ghostbusters, Real Genius, Better Off Dead, or Revenge of the Nerds, I rewatched it until I knew every scene by heart.


I devoured each of what Halliday referred to as “The Holy Trilogies”: Star Wars (original and prequel trilogies, in that order), Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Mad Max, Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones. (Halliday once said that he preferred to pretend the other Indiana Jones films, from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull onward, didn’t exist. I tended to agree.)

I also absorbed the complete filmographies of each of his favorite directors. Cameron, Gilliam, Jackson, Fincher, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg, Del Toro, Tarantino. And, of course, Kevin Smith.


I spent three months studying every John Hughes teen movie and memorizing all the key lines of dialogue.


Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive.


You could say I covered all the bases.


I studied Monty Python. And not just Holy Grail, either. Every single one of their films, albums, and books, and every episode of the original BBC series. (Including those two “lost” episodes they did for German television.)


I wasn’t going to cut any corners.


I wasn’t going to miss something obvious.


Somewhere along the way, I started to go overboard.


I may, in fact, have started to go a little insane.


I watched every episode of The Greatest American Hero, Airwolf, The A-Team, Knight Rider, Misfits of Science, and The Muppet Show.


What about The Simpsons, you ask?


I knew more about Springfield than I knew about my own city.


Star Trek? Oh, I did my homework. TOS, TNG, DS9. Even Voyager and Enterprise. I watched them all in chronological order. The movies, too. Phasers locked on target.


I gave myself a crash course in ’80s Saturday-morning cartoons.


I learned the name of every last goddamn Gobot and Transformer.


Land of the Lost, Thundarr the Barbarian, He-Man, Schoolhouse Rock!, G.I. Joe—I knew them all. Because knowing is half the battle.


Who was my friend, when things got rough? H.R. Pufnstuf.


Japan? Did I cover Japan?


Yes. Yes indeed. Anime and live-action. Godzilla, Gamera, Star Blazers, The Space Giants, and G-Force. Go, Speed Racer, Go.


I wasn’t some dilettante.


I wasn’t screwing around.


I memorized every last Bill Hicks stand-up routine.


Music? Well, covering all the music wasn’t easy.


It took some time.


The ’80s was a long decade (ten whole years), and Halliday didn’t seem to have had very discerning taste. He listened to everything. So I did too. Pop, rock, new wave, punk, heavy metal. From the Police to Journey to R.E.M. to the Clash. I tackled it all.


I burned through the entire They Might Be Giants discography in under two weeks. Devo took a little longer.


I watched a lot of YouTube videos of cute geeky girls playing ’80s cover tunes on ukuleles. Technically, this wasn’t part of my research, but I had a serious cute-geeky-girls-playing-ukuleles fetish that I can neither explain nor defend.


I memorized lyrics. Silly lyrics, by bands with names like Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, and Pink Floyd.


I kept at it.


I burned the midnight oil.


Did you know that Midnight Oil was an Australian band, with a 1987 hit titled “Beds Are Burning”?


I was obsessed. I wouldn’t quit. My grades suffered. I didn’t care.


I read every issue of every comic book title Halliday had ever collected.


I wasn’t going to have anyone questioning my commitment.


Especially when it came to the videogames.


Videogames were my area of expertise.


My double-weapon specialization.


My dream Jeopardy! category.


I downloaded every game mentioned or referenced in the Almanac, from Akalabeth to Zaxxon. I played each title until I had mastered it, then moved on to the next one.


You’d be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, is a lot of study time.


I worked my way through every videogame genre and platform. Classic arcade coin-ops, home computer, console, and handheld. Text-based adventures, first-person shooters, third-person RPGs. Ancient 8-, 16-, and 32-bit classics written in the previous century. The harder a game was to beat, the more I enjoyed it. And as I played these ancient digital relics, night after night, year after year, I discovered I had a talent for them. I could master most action titles in a few hours, and there wasn’t an adventure or role-playing game I couldn’t solve. I never needed any walkthroughs or cheat codes. Everything just clicked. And I was even better at the old arcade games. When I was in the zone on a high-speed classic like Defender, I felt like a hawk in flight, or the way I thought a shark must feel as it cruises the ocean floor. For the first time, I knew what it was to be a natural at something. To have a gift.

But it wasn’t my research into old movies, comics, or videogames that had yielded my first real clue. That had come while I was studying the history of old pen-and-paper role-playing games.


Reprinted on the first page of Anorak’s Almanac were the four rhyming lines of verse Halliday had recited in the Invitation video.


Three hidden keys open three secret gates


Wherein the errant will be tested for worthy traits


And those with the skill to survive these straits


Will reach The End where the prize awaits


At first, this seemed to be the only direct reference to the contest in the entire almanac. But then, buried among all those rambling journal entries and essays on pop culture, I discovered a hidden message.


Scattered throughout the text of the Almanac were a series of marked letters. Each of these letters had a tiny, nearly invisible “notch” cut into its outline. I’d first noticed these notches the year after Halliday died. I was reading my hard copy of the Almanac at the time, and so at first I thought the notches were nothing but tiny printing imperfections, perhaps due to the paper or the ancient printer I’d used to print out the Almanac. But when I checked the electronic version of the book available on Halliday’s website, I found the same notches on the exact same letters. And if you zoomed in on one of those letters, the notches stood out as plain as day.

Halliday had put them there. He’d marked these letters for a reason.


There turned out to be one hundred and twelve of these notched letters scattered throughout the book. By writing them down in the order they appeared, I discovered that they spelled something. I nearly died of excitement as I wrote it down in my grail diary:


The Copper Key awaits explorers


In a tomb filled with horrors


But you have much to learn


If you hope to earn


A place among the high scorers


Other gunters had also discovered this hidden message, of course, but they were all wise enough to keep it to themselves. For a while, anyway. About six months after I discovered the hidden message, this loudmouth MIT freshman found it too. His name was Steven Pendergast, and he decided to get his fifteen minutes of fame by sharing his “discovery” with the media. The newsfeeds broadcast interviews with this moron for a month, even though he didn’t have the first clue about the message’s meaning. After that, going public with a clue became known as “pulling a Pendergast.”

Once the message became public knowledge, gunters nicknamed it “the Limerick.” The entire world had known about it for almost four years now, but no one seemed to understand its true meaning, and the Copper Key still had yet to be found.


I knew Halliday had frequently used similar riddles in many of his early adventure games, and each of those riddles had made sense in the context of its game. So I devoted an entire section of my grail diary to deciphering the Limerick, line by line.


The Copper Key awaits explorers


This line seemed pretty straightforward. No hidden meaning that I could detect.


In a tomb filled with horrors.


This line was trickier. Taken at face value, it seemed to say that the key was hidden in a tomb somewhere, one filled with horrifying stuff. But then, during the course of my research, I discovered an old Dungeons & Dragons supplement called Tomb of Horrors, which had been published in 1978. From the moment I saw the title, I was certain the second line of the Limerick was a reference to it. Halliday and Morrow had played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons all through high school, along with several other pen-and-paper role-playing games, like GURPS, Champions, Car Wars, and Rolemaster.

Tomb of Horrors was a thin booklet called a “module.” It contained detailed maps and room-by-room descriptions of an underground labyrinth infested with undead monsters. D&D players could explore the labyrinth with their characters as the dungeon master read from the module and guided them through the story it contained, describing everything they saw and encountered along the way.

 

Ender, what's really your point there other than to say "I'm less talented than the hack writer I'm making fun of since all I can do is regurgitate this text!"

It's a book modeled on probably some combination of the Fenn Treasure and Byron Preiss' The Secret (no, not that one -- the more useful one), designed to be a reference point for 80s kids, and with very superficial examinations of cyberspace, populism vs. corporatism, etc.

And it's fun, even with a somewhat problematic protagonist, and not deep -- which is okay! Popcorn is fine! It's not Snow Crash. But most sci-fi isn't Vernor Vinge either (thank goodness), and it still manages to be just fine...

 

There was nothing “fun” about that. It had less coherence than an internet list article, and became painful about two sentences. Our name drop threads have more intervening structure.

I am aware of no posts on this website as awful and poorly thought out as what I just read.

It’s one thing to like something that’s just dumb, like the DCEU or the Kardashians. But this isn’t even readable enough to process the underlying stupidity.

 

I'm with Ender on this one. It's a terrible awful novel that is a weak pathetic excuse for reading material. There is absolutely nothing redeemable about this drivel. I'm almost certain the movie will be vastly superior (Spielberg did this too with Jaws, that novel was also rubbish) but that's not saying much at all. A colonoscopy with a cactus would be more entertaining than reading this book.

 

Let's review the lessons here:

1) Ender wants you to know he's read Snow Crash.
2) Jabba watches the Kardashians, but wants you to know that he does it in an ironic way.
3) People on the Internet have Strong Negative Opinions about something and want you to know that you're wrong if you don't agree.

 

I've never watched the Kardashians nor do I enjoy the DCEU. But I recognize it is theoretically possible to like them in a way that it's not with this. . .whatever it is. I don't see enough narrative there for me to call it a story any longer.

 

I wasn't serious (you've clearly never seen the Kardashians to come to your conclusion), but it's amusing that you take Ender's selection at face value, as if he doesn't have a very specific agenda here.
Clearly, your theory is wrong when people here have stated that they liked it.

 

Also, just to enrage Ender more, Ready Player One : Snow Crash :: The Force Awakens : A New Hope

 

Why should any novel have a passage like that at all? Ender very obviously has an agenda, but the book didn't have to cater to it so neatly.

 

And yet, again, people here have stated that they liked it. How can such things be?

What the **** difference does it make?

 

I am not arguing whether you like it or not. I am arguing that it is awful.

 

All I know is Olivia Cooke's in it and that's good enough for me .

 

That, I don't have a problem with - even if I disagree with you on that point.
But that isn't what's been going here.

 

Yeah, my problem is that Olivia Cooke is in it... so there!

(seriously, that's... not what that character description means...)

 

My selection? Are you drunk? High? The biproduct of forbidden passion betwixt siblings?

Let's recap events for the 80s kids who were obviously bullied for being nerds and who think this is a defiant retaliation to those bullies 30+ years later:

1. Wocky posted a video entitled "Ready Player One" for girls. That video rewrote a selection of text, which in the novel begins with "When it came to my research, I never took any shortcuts..." . That section then changed up the references in a way that parodied the original on multiple levels, starting with the video author's comments that as she's not a late 30s male, she didn't get them.
2. Wocky then concluded with a statement that "surely nobody would publish something like that"
3. I responded with the text from the novel, presented without comment, to illustrate what was published and how it aligned to the video's material.
4. Someone had a stroke, clearly because...
5. Your post.

Want to talk me through your recovery steps around #4? Oh and I didn't mean that as a reference to 80s sitcom "Diff'rent Strokes", though being 80s kids we would have picked up that reference for sure.

 

Well, you've convinced me - I hate it now. I've burned my copy and I'm definitely not seeing the movie.

Nah, just kidding. I still don't ****ing care.

I am worried that you're going to become one of those people that writes a 100+ page angry point-by-point rebuttal of a YouTube video criticizing Ep7.

 

Again I didn't though.

Wocky did not belief that such prose existed. I quoted him the original as proof. That's all that has your Star Wars underoos (a reference you'll get right?) in a bunch.

 

Fascinating, so now you are on the same page as Wocky, and not having a meltdown if people like it even if you despise it? There's hope for you yet, Ender.

 

Yes, like Wocky I think it's an objectively awful book. However, in this case, Wocky happens to be like me insofar as we're correct.

 

To borrow a turn of phrase from Pratchett, I guess we're at an imp arse here.

... well, not really. You'll go on complaining about how terrible it is, and I'll go on... continuing to like something I like, I guess? Everybody wins!

 

https://www.filmink.com.au/reviews/ready-player-one/

Great review.
"This may be the worst film of Spielberg’s career…"

It becomes impossible to ignore what a cynical exercise Ready Player One is when you realise the characters’ only investment in all the pop culture ephemera the film is steeped in is economic. They don’t actually like this stuff, and if they do, it’s for the shallowest and most mercenary of reasons: possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of ’80s (and ’90s, and even ’70s – the film spreads a wide net) nerd culture might help them solve the puzzle left behind by reclusive genius game designer James Halliday (Mark Rylance) left behind after his death and win All the Money in the World.

...

The film thinks you’re dumb, even going so far as to verbally underline the occasional bit of iconography you may not have clicked with, as when one character tells Wade that Art3mis is riding Kaneda’s bike from Akira. The idea that this film, whose whole schtick is to drown the audience in pop references, is smug enough to think the audience might not be smart enough to get those same references, is actually offensive. It’s insulting.

But that’s the state of play. That three-decade-wide net, filled with thousands of recognisable icons and symbols, is spread for one reason, and one reason alone: to catch as many fish as possible.

You’re the fish in this analogy, by the way. Swim the **** away from Ready Player One.​

Possible rebuttals to the criticism include:

* Attacking the journalist as a frustrated author/filmmaker, speaking out of jealousy
* "Battletoads! I get that reference!"
* Defending the vacuous, like pop culture references ("Akira's bike, how cool!" It's Kaneda's. "Yeah I loved Akira!") and "Snips" as a character
* Suggest the author didn't get the references and feels left out
* Suggest the author wasn't part of nerd culture and is a bully

Pick as you see fit, kids.

​

 

He doesn't help himself, though...

"is smug enough to think the audience might not be smart enough to get those same references, is actually offensive. It’s insulting."

then:

"That three-decade-wide net, filled with thousands of recognisable icons and symbols, is spread for one reason, and one reason alone: to catch as many fish as possible.

You’re the fish in this analogy, by the way."