Amph Ready Player One- book and film discussion thread

Everyone's entitled to their opinion. So far I have yet to see anyone convince me to turn from mine.

 

I don't anyone is trying to. Not here anyway. It's actually an extremely tolerant place for opinions, because most accept we all like terrible things.

 

Yeah but I remember you trying to argue your opinion was as valid as a statement of intent by Take2 interactive, so.... let's call it what it is, yeah?

Quite true.

 

If the book's main problem is the writing (don't know, haven't read it), the film might be an improvement.

 

"If you like things that are good, you've come to the wrong place."

 

I corrected it for you.

 

Remember that scene in This Is The End...



...where Franco and Danny McBride have the w ank fight? (seriously board censor? It's used in the correct context. Prudes.)

That's the scene that springs to mind reading any passage from RPO.

 

this is the antidote for people struggling to get through Melville's measurement of a whale's skeleton

 

The passage also does a good job of being emblematic of what I disliked the most about RPO: here you have the vast imaginative, creative possibilities of virtual reality and Cline goes back and back and back again to the wells of nostalgia, references, and other people’s old fiction instead of developing his own ideas or forming more of them.

 

Compare this to the Metaverse in Snow Crash:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse#Stephenson's_Metaverse_in_Snow_Crash

"
Stephenson's Metaverse in Snow Crash[edit]

Stephenson's Metaverse appears to its users as an urban environment, developed along a single hundred-meter-wide road, the Street, that runs the entire 65536 km (216 km) circumference of a featureless, black, perfectly spherical planet. The virtual real estate is owned by the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, a fictional part of the real Association for Computing Machinery, and is available to be bought and buildings developed thereupon.
Users of the Metaverse gain access to it through personal terminals that project a high-quality virtual reality display onto goggles worn by the user, or from low-quality public terminals in booths (with the penalty of presenting a grainy black and white appearance). Stephenson also describes a sub-culture of people choosing to remain continuously connected to the Metaverse by wearing portable terminals, goggles and other equipment; they are given the sobriquet "gargoyles" due to their grotesque appearance. The users of the Metaverse experience it from a first person perspective.
Within the Metaverse, individual users appear as avatars of any form, with the sole restriction of height, "to prevent people from walking around a mile high". Transport within the Metaverse is limited to analogs of reality by foot or vehicle, such as the monorail that runs the entire length of the Street, stopping at 256 Express Ports, located evenly at 256 km intervals, and Local Ports, one kilometer apart."

So it's not stuck in 2005 L3375p34k nor is it taking existing technology and just moving the dial one to the right. Definitely RPO is the bestest ever because Bill Hicks and Terry Gilliam and Ghostbusters and the A-Team and and and Dungeons and Dragons and Back to the Future and...

 

Wait a minute, there's a negative review on this book?

https://www.sfsite.com/09a/sn279.htm

 

I really don't think you understand opinions.

 

Of course I do. Everyone has them. No one book or film is perfect. It's all a matter of perspective.

 

Then explain the point of posting that review?

 

Ender Sai

All of the passages you bring up are emblamatic of the worst parts of the novel. Yeah, the nostalgia baiting geek dumps are poorly written and just used so people from the 80's can say "Oh hey, I remember that thing."

But that's not why I, and i'm going to go out and assume other people, enjoy the book. And it makes up comparably little of the book.

It's one of my favorite books because of how the novel structure's a hero's journey set within this dying world where people are drawn to 80's nostalgia and internet culture to cope with their environment. The Oasis is just that; it's an oasis from the crumbling real world. The main character uses it as an escape, as do most people, and we are shown how this system can be a good thing and a bad thing. Half way through the book, he basically falls into a depression just living in his room and existing on the Oasis. The only way for him to actually move forward is by doing something in the real world. But he also makes meaningful connections within the Oasis with the other Egg Hunters, and uses it as a conduit to find himself. It's this merging of the new and old with a spice of geek culture that I love.

And if you just want to keep posting cringy paragraphs that aren't representative of the novel while you sit on your literature high-horse, then know that you're missing the entire point.

 

To show that this Snow Crash novel wasn't liked by everyone.

 

ok wow well you understood the point and contrary to the effort you put into convincing people otherwise you really are quite brillaint.

 

You mean like the "nostalgia bad" passage criticism that you posted?

 

Has anyone suggested everyone liked Snow Crash?

 

Has anyone suggested everyone liked RPO?

 

I need to find the moving goalposts gif.

I will respond shortly to you, Outsourced.

 

I'll leave this one and be on my way. I'm tired of going back and forth here.

 

Well, the heart of your posts seems to be “I like this thing, how dare you not!”

But that’s just my opinion.

 

You're not going back and forth, though. You're shifting goalposts and being confused when the football is kicked at the old location.

let me spell it out simply; calling RPO the "poor man's Snow Crash" is talking about its core premise. It's not saying nobody liked/massively liked RPO or Snow Crash. It's calling out two stories that rely on events in a virtual world (you could sorta throw REAMDE in there too) where one exists seemingly for the sole purposes of guiding paper-thin characters past a dizzying array of shoehorned in popculture references that have no purpose other than bragging rights by Cline. Who comes across a bit like Trump - nobody has more 80s references than I do, ok? I have the most references. Everybody says so.

You're basically defending it because you like it, and nobody is saying you can't. They're saying as an artistic work, it's garbage. That the nostalgia factor is not in and of itself powerful enough to sustain a narrative. Stranger Things is a deliberate callback to an era, but that's not the purpose it exists for. It exists to tell a very 80s horror story, a story nobody tells anymore. The references are there to lend it weight, not to engage in masturbatory self congratulation. It enjoys the memes, in other words; it has no desire to eclipse the memes and become one itself.

You do this often; you fail to understand the tenor of a conversation, make bold statements that hide behind the defence of merely being an opinion (even though they are deaf and blind, in some cases, to readily accessible underlying facts) and then as a point of pride refuse to concede that hastily claiming this particular mountain was the best course of action when you might be underprepared and under-resourced to hold it.

Shooting from the hip, in other words, generally lacks accuracy.

Outsourced:

His friends - you mean the Japanese stereotypes, or the actual real biological rubenesque girl?

Let's just discuss this quest. The theme of urban decay is not new, but then again nothing in RPO is. The quest is to literally enrich one person, not to do anything to materially alter the society that's falling apart around him. And that's what he gets - gazbillion bucks split with 3 mates, and the power to disrupt the virtual reality that gave people a modern opiate of the masses. There are no stakes beyond his own enrichment - oh, except if if the wicked company gets its hands on the Oasis and monetises it.

What is the actual point?

In Snow Crash the risk to the metaverse is being matched with risks to people thanks to L Bob Rife's evangelical mates who are also distributing infected blood and who are waiting for Raven and his mates on the Raft to be let loose on the continental US. People will die unless the language virus is stopped.

In REAMDE, the reamde virus has real world implications because T'Rain exists as a fairly useful money laundering ring, and because the virtual currency is being ransomed all sorts of unsavoury characters get involved. The stakes are there for those people, but it's not global nor is it just "I will become teh b1ll10n41r3z!"

Here, it's really just a classic sociopath's journey to his ultimate fulfilment, in which bugger everyone because I too play games and I know that! reference and the winner can be me!

It's just... if it didn't have pop culture references to trigger reflexive nostalgia nobody would have read it.