Stop watching TV if you don't want IOI to take over

            A major theme in Ready Player One is that of getting distracted in the Oasis.  Early in the novel, Wade tells us that the world is stricken with poverty, a lack of housing, and global warming.  In fact, when he first meets Artemis he tells her that he would use the prize money to simply “I’d have a nuclear powered interstellar spacecraft constructed in Earth’s orbit…I’d invite a few of my closest friends to come aboard … and we’d get the hell out of Dodge. Leave the solar system and start looking for an extrasolar Earthlike planet” (Cline 97-98).  In this declaration, Wade admits he would use the money from the video game to essentially distract himself from all the problems of the world forever. However, in our own lives we distract ourselves from the world’s problems in several minute ways, which liken to Wade’s extreme example.

One scenario, which certainly most people can relate to, is that of sitting down in the evening with the intension of doing some homework or chores done, but hours later find themselves wasting a few hours watching some show on tv. But why do we do this and how does Cline use it to comment on our interaction with time?

First, what is the attraction to television? Is it really a preferable pastime to something productive? From a logical perspective, it should not be pleasurable at all, since it is literally sitting and doing nothing, while a screen changes its colors and produces noise.  However, there is something more to it.  Television, through episodes, allows us to step into a world wholly different from our own.  So, we can step into a world where the problems are the plots the characters deal with rather than the homework or chores breathing down our necks. This desire to escape our own reality in exchange for one where we can idly observe while forgetting the dilemmas of our own reality is what Cline points to in Ready Player One.

As we have already noted in our discussion of Ready Player One, Wade’s reality is one in which all the global disasters are immensely worsened.  This means, that the need to escape these disasters is also greatly increased.  Therefore, we have the greatest form of escape in the Oasis, and the ultimate escape as described by Wade.  But what does Cline say about this need to escape?

From 2018 to 2045, the crises and need to escape them grew together.  This suggests that for the human population to mitigate the coming crises, we ought to resist the temptation to simply waste time staring at technology.  Instead, Cline suggests via a changed Wade at the end of the novel that we should spend time away from our technology and use that forgotten time to make a difference in the real world.

In a story filled to the brim with gaming nostalgia, one of its greatest morals is that humankind should spend less time engaged with the games it venerates.  Rather, Cline argues that our time would be less wasted better for humanity as a whole if we simply just did our chores and homework instead of losing ourselves in the next episode of The Simpsons.