Ready Player One and 4th Grade

The first thing I noticed when I walked into Ms. Carmen’s 4^th grade class at for the first time was how kind the students were.  I expected the greetings of a substitute teacher, but they listened.  When I returned the next week, I would have been happy with a glimmer of recognition, after all I was only with them for an hour an entire week earlier.  If they remembered my name, that would have been beyond any expectation.  But, when I approached the class for my second day, it was as if no time had passed.  More than that, as they ran up to hug me, it was as if our short time together had been extended.

During my first visit, I was asked to take a small group of students out into the hallway a tutor them in long division.  The English major in me went through a moment of pure panic.  I was suddenly transported back to my 4^th grade self, who, in frustration at this very topic, would frequently break pencils and scare my older siblings away.  Time does wonders for patience.  The hallway was, literally, a liminal space.  But I have always found that some spaces have a strange liminality hanging over them, like airports after midnight or grocery stores.  A hallway during class, empty and drowned in florescent light, is a place where time feels different.  It was slow and lagging, yet almost removed from play.  If an abstract concept can have weight, it felt heavy.  I was given half an hour, but with no clock and this slightly oppressive atmosphere, I had no sense of time passing.  If it had been 15 minutes or an hour, I could not tell you.

It was in this hallway (when we were most assuredly not doing long division) that one of the students mentioned he had gotten in trouble because he played a video game for 5 hours the night before.  When I asked how he could possibly play for that long, he claimed that he didn’t even realize time was moving.  There is a similar moment in Ready Player One where Wade plays PAC-MAN for 6 hours straight.  At first we get lengthy descriptions of his initial attempts to complete the perfect game, we get the sense of time moving slowly.  However, once Wade gets in the rhythm of the game, things happen much more quickly, almost all at once.  Like Wade, the student also was in “the zone.”  This zone is like another dimension, one where absolute focus takes you out of the realm of your immediate surroundings.  It is not escapism per se, but you are removed from time.  Similar to the atmosphere of the school hallway, any amount of time could have gone by, as I had no sense of it.

Manipulating Reality and Time

      It’s no secret that technology is becoming more integrated into our lives. No longer universally considered a privilege, it is beginning to be considered a necessity. Countries or populations without the means to acquire technology are often aware of that fact. Many Nations like the US are saturated in cell phones and computers for adults and kids alike. There is more wearable technology and intelligent household devices being developed, further infiltrating even our most intimate spaces and moments. While Ready Player One is not a story written about our current reality, it is a projection of our future. As time progresses, our conception of reality has begun to change. Technology has allowed for a different version of reality to grow in our conscience. Video games are a different world for us to project ourselves much the same way as social media provides a similar detachment from our true selves.
Once in the OASIS, Wade is allowed to be someone completely different from himself. In the real world, he lives in extremely cramped and impoverished conditions. He has no powerful parenting figures and his education is one characterized primarily by humiliation. The OASIS cannot eliminate the existence of the real world, but it mutes it and creates a new one. This is exactly the same function as Social media sites and online gaming. Just as he can block his bullies at school, users can block other users they don't like online. Just as Wade can socialize and share his adventures superficially, we do the same on Facebook or Instagram.
As a student soon graduating from college in the US, I have been part of and bore witness of the effect of technology on my generation. While the world of Ready Player One will most likely not mirror our own by 2045, I fear that there will be some similarities. Video games, virtual reality, social media and technological outlets alike are only going to grow exponentially in the coming years. The disconnect amongst human beings and reality will also most likely grow an even greater divide if nothing is done to help humanity grow with technology in the right way. Superficiality has always existed, but we’ve never had the same kinds of opportunities to indulge ourselves.

The Times We Live In and the Future We Face

The Times We Live In and the Future We Face

No one watches where they are walking anymore. People at Loyola, and around the world, step one foot after another, with their heads buried in their cell phones, oblivious to the world around them. They are either texting their significant other, rather than speaking to them face to face, or they are playing a game like angry birds or candy crush. I often hear people say that phones can connect us to people around the world or people that we may not have normally been in connection with, however is it worth the cost of being disconnected from the people and the world immediately around us. Make no mistake, I am just as guilty as anyone else, of accidentally walking into someone or accidentally ignoring someone because I am on my phone. I merely am pointing out that phones do not connect us to the world but rather they isolate us from it.

I must admit, at the onset of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, I was skeptical of the world it presented, that is a virtual one. What is remarkable about the movies the Matrix and Inception, both which take the viewer through an alternate reality, is that they are clearly fantasies. What makes Ready Player One both unique and terrifying is that it is disturbingly possible. In 2044, human beings could actually play a video game to escape from reality, they could meet people and judge them based off of their avatars, never seeing them in person and they could communicate only via internet chats, never through actual conversations.

In the novel the virtual reality replaces actual physical reality and virtual time replacing actual time. All of this begs the question what people should value. The objectives and achievements only made possible through a video game or should people value the relationships and interpersonal connections which can only occur in physical time and space. Ready Player One is brilliant as a novel because of its ability to keep the reader turning pages, facing the struggle between real life and technology in their own minds, as well as in the pages on the novel.

Wait, What Year Is It?

One very interesting aspect of Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is the way that the author uses technology to blur retrospective time, projected time, and present time. The passages discussing the 80’s begin as retrospective time, our narrator, Wade, is looking back to a time that James Halliday, the creator of OASIS, was obsessed with. It is clear that this is retrospective time, because Wade is living 30 years into our future. Wade tells us, in giving us a retrospective view of James Halliday’s life, “he also had an extreme fixation on the 1980s, the decade during which he’d been a teenager. Halliday seemed to expect everyone around him to share his obsessions, and often lashed out at those who didn’t” (55). As a grown man, Halliday is obsessed with his teenage years, and his mind is a vault of pop culture and trivia from the 1980s. As Wade describes the 1980s, they are clearly not happening in his present time. He describes floppy discs and Dungeons & Dragons and we as readers recognize that these passages are an example of retrospective time.

However, it is after Halliday’s death, when he reveals the existence of the Easter Egg, that retrospective, projected, and present time become blurred. Wade tells the reader from the start that the 1980s are a time that he projects himself into in order to cope with his difficult home situation. “I selected an episode of Family Ties, an 80s sitcom about a middle-class family living in central Ohio...I always found myself imagining that I lived in that warm, well-lit house, and that those smiling, understanding people were my family” (15). This is not unlike what the reader experiences in The Martian, when Mark Watney projects himself into the 1970s via sitcom episodes and music in order to allow himself to temporarily escape from the cruel reality of his situation. The way Wade uses 80s sitcoms are an undeniable comparison. In this case, it is clear that the 80s are an example of projected time. Halliday himself projects himself into the 80s in his death video, for example: “Halliday appears to have digitally re-created the funeral parlor set [from a scene in the 1989 film Heathers] and then inserted himself into it” (3).

Wade tells us that after Halliday died and circulated copies of “Anorak’s Almanac,” there was a huge cultural shift. The event of Halliday dying, in my opinion, is what blurs the difference between retrospective, projected, and present time in the novel. “This led to a global fascination with 1980s pop culture. Fifty years after the decade had ended, the movies, music, games, and fashions of the 1980s were all the rage once again. By 2041, spiked hair and acid-washed jeans were back in style, and covers of hit ‘80s pop songs by contemporary bands dominated the music charts. People who had actually been teenagers in the 1980s, all now approaching old age, had the strange experience of seeing the fads and fashions of their youth embraced and studied by their grandchildren” (7-8). Thus, when Wade is growing up, it is the 1980s almost all over again. This is a perfect example of the way that time exists in a nonlinear, continuous stream. The experiences that Halliday had in the actual 1980s led to his obsession with the pop culture of the 80s, and that obsession informed his behavior in his future, which then informs the behavior of all of this followers, who do everything they can to turn back the clock. It ends up that Wade is living in a version of the 1980s, complete with songs on the radio and the same popular fashions and games, to the point where the elderly who actually experienced the true 1980s feel as though they are experiencing it again. In this way, Cline blurs the timeline that Halliday, Wade, and everyone on Earth are living in, and paints Halliday as a time-being. Even after death, he is able to project the whole world back in time, so that people are living with 80s music, but played by contemporary bands. It’s the 1980s but also it is not. It’s retrospective time that people are projecting themselves into but also living in the present.

Can You Know Someone's True-Self Online?

Growing up always knowing social media, my generation was always told to be skeptical of people on the internet. Do not trust people online? You cannot really know if they are telling the truth. Ready Player One voices these sentiments. The characters are very careful about putting their personal information in the system. This precaution is commonly taken by many people today. You never put your social security number or bank account information anywhere online. We are well aware of hackers.

Artemis reiterates to Parzival multiple times “you don’t even know me” (186). In the OASI anyone can be anyone. You can change your appearance and have a different online persona than in real life. AS Artemis explains to Parzival “you only know what I want you to know. You only see what I want you to see” (186). Ultimately, and usually rightfully so, we have been taught to regard people you meet online or websites you visit with mistrust. In this scenario, Artemis and Perzival have the added challenge of being competitors; all the more reason for them to not trust each other. However, Perzival breaks away from the internet-smarts that we all have been ingrained with by falling in love with Artemis online.

Artemis points out that he has never met her in real life and does not really know who she is as a person. The question arises as to whether or not you can really get to know someone online? Perzival’s actions and words seem to argue that you can actually get to know the core values and desires of a person, for “in the OASIS, you could become whomever and whatever you wanted to be” (57). In the OASIS, people cannot see your physical appearance and they recognize that people rarely ever look like their avatars. The OASIS eliminates first impressions based off appearance. When you speak to someone, you cannot judge them based off standards of beauty or attractiveness. What is attractive to Perzival about Artemis is her mind, not her body. Therefore, in the OASIS people can overcome their physical insecurities and reveal their actual personality and thoughts. Feasibly, your true self can be revealed online especially for tose “painfully shy, awkward kids, with low self-esteem and almost no social skills” (30). For people like Perzival, these are hindrances to forming relationships, expressing interests, and communicating with others. Although, Perzival is insulating himself in the OASIS, he feels less alone in it than he does in real life. In reality, he was bullied at school. In the OASIS, he can study and overcome bullying. He can make friends in the OASIS and fall in love with a girl.

However, Artemis makes a valid point about meeting someone in real life. Perzival cannot simply base his love for Artemis just on his interactions with her avatar. She is completely correct in stating that she can hide things easily form him and he would never find out unless he met her in person. While his love for her is more genuinely founded in her conversation and personality, he cannot simply translate his emotions for her online to real life. In real life, he may find that she is completely different and put on a false persona. Perhaps if they met in person, they would both be too shy or awkward to connect and communicate in the same easy manner that they do online. The answer to the question is that you cannot know who someone truly is just online. A person’s online personality can reveal a lot. You can learn about something that you otherwise may not have found out in real life. However, the downside and dangerous alternative is that the person hides something very important about themselves. You are who you want to be online. And sometimes this can be the complete opposite of who you actually are in person.