For Spring Break, I traveled to Paris, France with two of my good friends. Paris is 6 hours ahead of New York, where I am from, so our flight left New York around 5pm on Saturday and arrived in Paris around 11am on Sunday morning. One of the weirdest parts of travelling or being away from my friends, for me, has always been the thought that time continues to pass for the people you leave behind even when you are not with them. It’s weird and hard to conceptualize, because we have to think about the fact that every human being feels time passing differently, regardless of if other people are around to observe or mark that time passing. Just because I left home did not mean that time stopped for my family; on the contrary, time continued to pass at the rate it always had in New York, even while I was in Paris. I think that it’s weird to think of your family and friends having completely separate lives that have nothing to do with you, and to think about the fact that literally every person you come into contact with had an entire past, childhood, and has an entire future, even though you might not be a part of it. This became really salient for me when I was travelling over spring break because I was jet lagged, so I was acutely aware of the way time was passing back in New York. It almost felt like time was trying to drag me along with it, even though I was distanced from the New York timeline and life in New York had nothing to do with me at the time. Gradually, I felt slightly less jet lagged, but that does not mean that time in New York was slowing down or ceasing, I just wasn’t feeling it as much. It felt strange to be inside and outside the timeline of my hometown city at the same time; I was outside it because I was in a city with a different time zone where different things happened at different times, but I was still inside it because I felt the jetlag and spoke to my father on the phone.
This thought interested me a lot when I was considering the way that time passes or does not pass in Ready Player One. From the beginning, Wade tells us that each time he logs back in, his avatar shows up in the last place that he left him. So, time in Ready Player One would seem to only be passing as Wade chose to pass it. However, there are times when the score board changes or something occurs and Wade has no idea that it is occurring until it is over. So, through one lens, time does not pass for Wade within OASIS unless he is plugged in, but on the other hand, time continues to pass regardless of whether or not Wade is logged in because each of the characters have their own separate elaborate story. Even though Wade’s avatar is literally frozen in time whenever he logs out, (and he rejoins the game as if no time passed at all) there are other characters who, like my family back in New York did, continue to live full lives even when Wade is not consciously aware of them. Wade must then weigh the importance of what he is doing in OASIS with what he is doing in the real world. He must decide if he wants to miss out on being a part of time passing in the real world or in OASIS, as deciding to spend more time in either place means missing time in the other place. While I could stay in touch using my phone and planning out calls, Wade finds it harder because of having to turn his avatar on and off. He must exist almost totally in one world or the other. This is a big question for Wade, how to spend his time and which time he should be spending (OASIS time or real life time) up until the end of the novel.
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