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Darth Walrus posted:Big civil-rights hero. Which does make calling your liberator of the nerds Wade Watts faintly suspect. See thats the context that matters
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 13:19 |
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# ? Jun 1, 2024 05:58 |
https://twitter.com/mrfeelswildride/status/973288876570587137
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 13:31 |
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oh you were shot on the street for wearing a hoodie? Well, a jock pushed me into a locker once we are brothers in the struggle
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 13:39 |
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Well, that was some perfect post timing right there.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 13:39 |
The first proper part of the book, "Level One", begins with a quote from Anorak's Almanac.quote:Being human totally sucks most of the time. Videogames are the only thing that make life bearable. In case you thought Halliday would ever get more likable, you're out of luck. quote:I was jolted awake by the sound of gunfire in one of the neighboring stacks. The shots were followed by a few minutes of muffled shouting and screaming, then silence. Here's the first glimpse we get of our hero, Wade Watts. Within seconds of meeting him, we discover just how much of his personality is based around the obsessive Hunt and rote consumption of all media related to it. We learn more about the stacks later, but I'll cover it here. As you can see on the movie poster (which is the cover of new editions of the book), the economic problems the United States is facing about 20 years from now basically killed any ability to live in rural areas. Everyone just packed up and moved to the nearest city, and to deal with the sudden overcrowding they just combined all their trailers, RVs, mobile homes, shipping containers, and cars into towering shantytowns that occasionally topple over. Somehow this made more sense than expanding outward and all occurred over an incredibly short timeframe. Wade's home in the Portland Avenue Stacks of Oklahoma City is a former double-wide trailer with 15 people living in it, including two other families renting bedrooms. quote:I pulled out my laptop and powered it on. It was a bulky, heavy beast, almost ten years old. I’d found it in a trash bin behind the abandoned strip mall across the highway. I’d been able to coax it back to life by replacing its system memory and reloading the stone-age operating system. The processor was slower than a sloth by current standards, but it was fine for my needs. The laptop served as my portable research library, video arcade, and home theater system. Its hard drive was filled with old books, movies, TV show episodes, song files, and nearly every videogame made in the twentieth century. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9kXKzYorFo I live in the Orlando area, and until September you could find DisneyQuest at what's now called Disney Springs. It was a big 5-story arcade with free games once you paid admission, including a whole room full of 80s arcade games. When I was a kid I played Robotron quite a few times there, though I could never get past 5 or 6 waves. It's definitely one of the loudest and most annoying arcade games of the time, and I feel bad for anyone who hears him playing it for hours. Once he's done, Wade browses through his video files; he's downloaded every single piece of media mentioned in the Almanac. He picks an episode of Family Ties, though he's already watched all 180 episodes multiple times. He says it would take decades for him to watch and play everything mentioned in the Almanac, but that seems to be more because he does poo poo like watch all 180 episodes of Family Ties repeatedly. We learn a bit more about Wade's family. His parents had him when they were teenagers and his father was shot in a grocery store robbery when he was a few months old. His mother, Loretta, raised him alone while working as an OASIS telemarketer by day and an OASIS brothel prostitute by night. Since earplugs didn't really help Wade not hear his mom dirty talking to clients every night, he watched movies with the volume turned up to drown it out. Eventually she gave Wade an OASIS visor and gloves as a toddler and used the virtual world as a babysitter, leaving him to be raised in a virtual Sesame Street and playing learning games. Since OASIS also acts as the world's biggest public library, he began spending all of his time consuming media in it. So what we get here is sort of a Freudian excuse for Wade's lack of personality: he was raised on a steady diet of pop culture practically from birth at the expense of having actual parents. He's more like a golem created from DVDs and binary code. quote:I don’t know, maybe your experience differed from mine. For me, growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth. Existentially speaking. Wade says that he wishes someone told him the truth right up front, and we get a long quasi-monologue describing what he wants someone to have told him. It's really not interesting enough to copy and paste, because it's basically a long form "God doesn't exist, the economy sucks, there's an oil crisis, global warming is terrible, and we're all going to die and experience eternal oblivion because the afterlife is a fairy tale so you may as well just play video games forever to dull the pain." It's edgy teenager philosophy for three pages. quote:The OASIS is the setting of all my happiest childhood memories. When my mom didn’t have to work, we would log in at the same time and play games or go on interactive storybook adventures together. She used to have to force me to log out every night, because I never wanted to return to the real world. Because the real world sucked. You can tell how important Wade's mom is to his life because she gets like two sentences dedicated to her death. We get a quick mention of Wade having wallowed in despair after she died, but it feels kind of meaningless because we never see any of this despair. By the time the book takes place, he's already moved on to an obsession over gaining Halliday's fortune. The only way we can find out that he felt sad is because he told us that he felt sad once. Halfway through the fourth episode of Family Ties, Aunt Alice comes in. As soon as she sees Wade's laptop, she demands that he hand it over to pawn for food vouchers. He protests that he needs it for school (which he doesn't) and that he already gives up all of his food vouchers for rent, so she brings over her shirtless thug of a tattooed boyfriend Rick to threaten Wade for it. He doesn't even say a word, just raises his fist, and Wade hands the laptop over. He's already locked the keyboard and erased the hard drive before Rick got in and he's got two spares hidden in the trailer, but now he needs to restore it from his backups. Since dawn is approaching, Wade decides to leave for school early. He pulls on his only winter clothes and exits the trailer, which is the top unit in a 22-story stack alongside I-40. The stacks are covered in solar panels and water and sewage tubing to deal with the basics of life. quote:Our trailer was near the northern edge of the stacks, which ran up to a crumbling highway overpass. From my vantage point at the laundry room window, I could see a thin stream of electric vehicles crawling along the cracked asphalt, carrying goods and workers into the city. As I stared out at the grim skyline, a bright sliver of the sun peeked over the horizon. Watching it rise, I performed a mental ritual: Whenever I saw the sun, I reminded myself that I was looking at a star. One of over a hundred billion stars in our galaxy. A galaxy that was just one of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe. This helped me keep things in perspective. I’d started doing it after watching a science program from the early ’80s called Cosmos. You really are lucky to get through even one page without an 80s reference. quote:I slipped out the window as quietly as possible and, clutching the bottom of the window frame, slid down the cold surface of the trailer’s metal siding. The steel platform on which the trailer rested was only slightly wider and longer than the trailer itself, leaving a ledge about a foot and a half wide all the way around. I carefully lowered myself until my feet rested on this ledge, then reached up to close the window behind me. I grabbed hold of a rope I’d strung there at waist level to serve as a handhold and began to sidestep along the ledge to the corner of the platform. From there I was able to descend the ladderlike frame of the scaffolding. I almost always took this route when leaving or returning to my aunt’s trailer. A rickety metal staircase was bolted to the side of the stack, but it shook and knocked against the scaffolding, so I couldn’t use it without announcing my presence. Bad news. In the stacks, it was best to avoid being heard or seen, whenever possible. There were often dangerous and desperate people about—the sort who would rob you, rape you, and then sell your organs on the black market. Wade pauses at the unit three stories below, an Airstream trailer, to say hi to Mrs. Gilmore. She's a woman in her 70s who spends most of her time in an OASIS megachurch congregation. Wade uses his technical expertise to fix her console when it breaks in exchange for anecdotes about life in the 80s. quote:She was always praying for me too. Trying her hardest to save my soul. I never had the heart to tell her that I thought organized religion was a total crock. It was a pleasant fantasy that gave her hope and kept her going—which was exactly what the Hunt was for me. To quote the Almanac: “People who live in glass houses should shut the gently caress up.” Wade I think you might be an rear end in a top hat. Reaching the "floor" (the sunless ground level of the stacks), Wade weaves through an obstacle course of junk filling the spaces between stacks. His destination is a haphazard junkyard where all the abandoned vehicles used to reach Oklahoma City were thrown after their construction. Specifically, he's heading to his hideout in a van that's 2/3 buried under other cars and just open enough for him to squeeze through the rear doors. Wade turned this van into his 4x4x9 foot hideout after he found it still with the keys. quote:The van was my refuge. My Batcave. My Fortress of Solitude. It was where I attended school, did my homework, read books, watched movies, and played videogames. It was also where I conducted my ongoing quest to find Halliday’s Easter egg. If you turned identifying references into a drinking game with non-alcoholic beer, you would still die of alcohol poisoning. Wade hops onto an exercise bike and pedals to charge the batteries; because he has nothing else in his life, this and climbing down the stacks are his only daily exercise. quote:I opened the rat-proof metal box where I kept my food cache and took out some bottled water and a packet of powdered milk. I mixed these together in a bowl, then dumped in a generous serving of Fruit Rocks cereal. Once I’d wolfed it down, I retrieved an old plastic Star Trek lunch box I kept hidden under the van’s crushed dashboard. Inside were my school-issued OASIS console, haptic gloves, and visor. These items were, by far, the most valuable things I owned. Far too valuable to carry around with me.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 14:38 |
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hey guys fyi google "nerd porn auteur" njoi
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 14:43 |
Mel Mudkiper posted:hey guys I helpfully included a link in the OP! But just in case you've been trying to avoid reading it:
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 15:01 |
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So, 15 people in a double wide that's 22 stories up, and there's a laundry room. Uh-huh. I did the math to see what year Halliday wouldve been born, to compare with my own age. 1971 or 72 (so pretty close to my 1974). Then I looked up Cline, and whaddya know, of course he was born in 1972. March 29th, actually. March 29th. The day the movie comes out. He is literally game master anthony, celebrating his birthday with all of his favorite tv, comics, video games references. BRING IT IN, GUYS!!! Chi, pass the torpedo juice.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 15:11 |
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chitoryu12 posted:I helpfully included a link in the OP! But just in case you've been trying to avoid reading it: It takes a very strange level of delusion to declare that you masturbate to traditionally unattractive women as some sort of statement of feminist empowerment Not to give anything away, but this weird sort of anti-objectification as objectification shows up hard in the book
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 15:21 |
JacquelineDempsey posted:So, 15 people in a double wide that's 22 stories up, and there's a laundry room. Uh-huh. I think Cline straight up said that he put Halliday's age as almost identical to his own so they could share interests.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 15:24 |
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chitoryu12 posted:I think Cline straight up said that he put Halliday's age as almost identical to his own so they could share interests. Of course. It's the hack's code: Write what you already know, because research is for chumps. Someone gifted me the Audible version of this book a while back, and I'm glad to see it's no better in text.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 15:28 |
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I just find this interesting because of that review claiming that this book is this generation's Neuromancer. Here we got a book written by a guy 2 years older than me --- and I'm an old fart by Internet standards --- that does nothing but fan wank about 80s poo poo. Stuff that happened well before "this" generation, if that reviewer is talking millennial so or whatever. Long story short: I'm his prime age bracket demographic, and this poo poo is abysmal.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 15:49 |
Trust me, it gets even stupider when OASIS boots up.JacquelineDempsey posted:I just find this interesting because of that review claiming that this book is this generation's Neuromancer. Here we got a book written by a guy 2 years older than me --- and I'm an old fart by Internet standards --- that does nothing but fan wank about 80s poo poo. Stuff that happened well before "this" generation, if that reviewer is talking millennial so or whatever. I showed the infamous excerpt to my mom (who was born in 1964) and she was aghast. She said that after living the 80s she didn't want to experience this much of it all at once.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 15:49 |
All right, normally I update a chapter a day but I want to get to the meat of this book: OASIS.quote:My avatar materialized in front of my locker on the second floor of my high school—the exact spot where I’d been standing when I’d logged out the night before. So yeah, OASIS is such a big thing that its digital currency is the most valuable in the world. Despite the economy tanking? Also I'm unsure just how much of OASIS is supposed to seem like a video game with great graphics and how much it's supposed to feel like a holodeck, because Cline seemingly writes both. quote:A small mirror was mounted inside my locker door, and I caught a glimpse of my virtual self as I closed it. I’d designed my avatar’s face and body to look, more or less, like my own. My avatar had a slightly smaller nose than me, and he was taller. And thinner. And more muscular. And he didn’t have any teenage acne. But aside from these minor details, we looked more or less identical. The school’s strictly enforced dress code required that all student avatars be human, and of the same gender and age as the student. No giant two-headed hermaphrodite demon unicorn avatars were allowed. Not on school grounds, anyway. The movie makes Wade's avatar, Parzival, look like a knock-off Raiden from Metal Gear Solid. This DeviantArt drawing probably looks more like the real thing: Wade says he started out with the username Wade_The_Great, then after a few changes settled on a reference to Percival from King Arthur's round table. He had to choose the weird spelling because all the others were taken. While OASIS has data on all users' real identification (even their fingerprints and retinal patterns), a Supreme Court ruling allowed it to remain private and the real identity of users is locked up tight by Gregarious Simulation Systems. Wade's school has his info, but only accessible by the principal so not even his teachers or classmates know who he is. quote:Students weren’t allowed to use their avatar names while they were at school. This was to prevent teachers from having to say ridiculous things like “Pimp_Grease, please pay attention!” or “BigWang69, would you stand up and give us your book report?” Instead, students were required to use their real first names, followed by a number, to differentiate them from other students with the same name. When I enrolled, there were already two other students at my school with the first name Wade, so I’d been assigned the student ID of Wade3. That name floated above my avatar’s head whenever I was on school grounds. This book would have been much better with BigWang69 as the protagonist. The school bell rings and brings up a HUD notification that Wade has 40 minutes to get to class. He uses subtle hand motions to move, but can also use voice commands if his hands are occupied and I can't help but feel like that's the worst maneuvering system for a VR game. I don't know if it would be worse writing to ignore that and make OASIS basically a holodeck for the reader or to follow it exactly and have everyone's dialogue occasionally interrupted by shouted directional commands. College is done in OASIS as well, but it still requires money and Wade has neither the money nor the scholarship to get in. Since he doesn't want to sign a 5-year indenturement contract with a corporation (this is supposed to be cyberpunk in case you forgot, and you will), his only prospect in life is to be a full time gunter. Wade is approached by a school bully, Todd13. He makes fun of Wade for wearing one of the default avatar outfits instead of an expensive designer skin. quote:“Your mom bought them for me,” I retorted without breaking my stride. “Tell her I said thanks, the next time you stop at home to breast-feed and pick up your allowance.” Childish, I know. But virtual or not, this was still high school—the more childish an insult, the more effective it was. Wade mentions a planet here. It's brought up casually earlier in the book, but OASIS consists of thousands of virtual planets. I'm not sure if any size is really established for them, but the processing power for this game probably takes Moore's Law and stomps it into dust. Wade attended a real school until 6th grade, which didn't go well because his childhood growing up in an MMORPG emotionally stunted him and he has no way of communicating with anyone outside of video games. As you can imagine, he's overweight and poorly dressed in the real world as well because he's a poor OASIS addict on a diet of government-subsidized junk food. In short, Wade is the gooniest loser of a protagonist that could have been written. quote:Even so, I tried my best to fit in. Year after year, my eyes would scan the lunchroom like a T-1000, searching for a clique that might accept me. But even the other outcasts wanted nothing to do with me. I was too weird, even for the weirdos. And girls? Talking to girls was out of the question. To me, they were like some exotic alien species, both beautiful and terrifying. Whenever I got near one of them, I invariably broke out in a cold sweat and lost the ability to speak in complete sentences. Never mind. He's actually a troper protagonist. quote:Then, one glorious day, our principal announced that any student with a passing grade-point average could apply for a transfer to the new OASIS public school system. The real public school system, the one run by the government, had been an underfunded, overcrowded train wreck for decades. And now the conditions at many schools had gotten so terrible that every kid with half a brain was being encouraged to stay at home and attend school online. I nearly broke my neck sprinting to the school office to submit my application. It was accepted, and I transferred to OASIS Public School #1873 the following semester. So I want to break off for a little bit to talk about escapist school fantasy. This is a really common subgenre of young adult fiction that permeates sci-fi and fantasy: the protagonist is whisked away to a fantastical environment where everything is cool and awesome, they get to learn awesome stuff, and they can take advantage of the special powers they have (and maybe an old prophecy or destiny) to become famous and powerful. Everyone's read or watched works like this, like Harry Potter, Sky High, The Magicians, Psychonauts, or countless anime and visual novels. Where RPO breaks from this trope is that the protagonist only has anything special about him in this environment. In Harry Potter, for instance, Harry has to go back to the Dursleys every summer and not do any magic, but at least he has magic and it's just a matter of time before he can be free of their bondage and go about being the powerful Chosen One full time. When he's at Hogwarts, he gets to spend most of the year surrounded by magic and friends and adventure. On the other hand, Wade has to go back to the real world every day. At the end of the day, he has to turn off OASIS and go back to being a poor fat kid with acne living in the slums. The whole point of escapist fantasy like this is that it allows for people to imagine a way that their life can magically change overnight (sometimes literally). They really have superhuman powers or a special destiny, and they're taken away from a dreary and boring life to a world of adventure where everything revolves around them. Their original life is replaced with a new life, and they never have to go back. How many people do you know on Facebook who have sarcastically listed their job as "Waiting for my Hogwarts acceptance letter"? Wade has to go back unless he succeeds at finding the Easter egg. And even then, it's going to take work to stop being a fat acne-ridden kid who has no social skills once he takes off his virtual reality headset; it's not like finding the Easter egg and gaining control over a $240 billion fortune is suddenly going to grant him muscles and the ability to talk to girls without being the "Jizz In My Pants" guy. For all he knows, he's now going to really be like Notch: fabulously wealthy but fat, lonely, and unloved except for the digital masses who don't know what he's like in the real world. quote:When I arrived in my World History classroom, several students were already seated at their desks. Their avatars all sat motionless, with their eyes closed. This was a signal that they were “engaged,” meaning they were currently on phone calls, browsing the Web, or logged into chat rooms. It was poor OASIS etiquette to try to talk to an engaged avatar. They usually just ignored you, and you’d get an automated message telling you to piss off. Wade opens up the Hatchery, a gunter forum; in keeping with their cargo cult of the past, the forum is designed to look like a 1980s BBS complete with a screeching modem sound when logging in. Most of the forum is useless bragging and running in circles trying to decipher cryptic Almanac hints, so Wade rarely posts. The important story info we get is that there are a lot of threads making fun of Sixers, or "Suxorz" because Cline's knowledge of the Internet ended about 20 years ago. These are employees of Innovative Online Industries (IOI), a multinational conglomerate and world's largest ISP, who use their six-digit employee ID numbers as their avatar names. IOI has formed a Department of Oology as professional Easter egg hunters dedicated to using the power of science to find the Easter egg and gain control of GSS, allowing them to monetize OASIS and plaster ads everywhere. Sixers are the corporate military analogue of this cyberpunk setting. They all sign a contract stipulating that they'll give control of GSS to IOI if they find the egg, in return for real world food and board, benefits, health insurance, and lots of powerful OASIS gear. All Sixer avatars use the same generic male appearance with default facial features and a navy blue uniform, only differentiated by their employee ID stamped on the right breast of their avatar's uniform. Sixers are so hated among gunters that they're often killed on sight and some of the larger clans hold competitions to see who can kill the most. quote:Like most gunters, I loathed the Sixers and was disgusted by their very existence. By hiring an army of contract egg hunters, IOI was perverting the entire spirit of the contest. Of course, it could be argued that all the gunters who had joined clans were doing the same thing. There were now hundreds of gunter clans, some with thousands of members, all working together to find the egg. Each clan was bound by an ironclad legal agreement stating that if one clan member won the contest, all members would share the prize. Solos like me didn’t care much for the clans, either, but we still respected them as fellow gunters—unlike the Sixers, whose goal was to hand the OASIS over to an evil multinational conglomerate intent on ruining it. "It's okay for a private organization to gain control over the entire fortune and OASIS, as long as they're not this evil one!" quote:After checking a few other gunter forums, I tapped a bookmark icon for one of my favorite websites, Arty’s Missives, the blog of a female gunter named Art3mis (pronounced “Artemis”). I’d discovered it about three years ago and had been a loyal reader ever since. She posted these great rambling essays about her search for Halliday’s egg, which she called a “maddening MacGuffin hunt.” She wrote with an endearing, intelligent voice, and her entries were filled with self-deprecating humor and witty, sardonic asides. In addition to posting her (often hysterical) interpretations of passages in the Almanac, she also linked to the books, movies, TV shows, and music she was currently studying as part of her Halliday research. I assumed that all of these posts were filled with misdirection and misinformation, but they were still highly entertaining. Yeah if you read "Nerd Porn Auteur", you can definitely start seeing Cline's type of woman creeping in here. Also Wade is so stunted that he slobbers over a female avatar of someone who could very well be a 45-year-old basement goon (remember how nobody knows the true identity of anyone in OASIS?) and saves all her avatar headshots. Our hero. Also notice how Wade specifies that her face is supposed to be so realistic that it looks like her facial features were scanned onto her avatar. The movie takes the opposite approach and goes as Uncanny Valley as humanly possible: Wade finishes reading Art3mis's latest blog post (an in-depth essay on John Hughes teen movies) when he gets an instant message from his best (and only) friend. quote:Aech: Top o’ the morning, amigo. Oh yeah that's the end of the chapter. Just kind of meanders to a close like Cline realized it was running too long and chopped it in half. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Mar 13, 2018 |
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 17:00 |
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Does he ever explain why a world in which trailers are stacked on top of each other to form unstable towers of rusted death can afford to supply hundreds of thousands of VR headsets to children in public education Like, he goes to #1873 That means there are roughly 2000 digital schools giving loving VR headsets to hundreds of random kids each
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 17:10 |
Mel Mudkiper posted:Does he ever explain why a world in which trailers are stacked on top of each other to form unstable towers of rusted death can afford to supply hundreds of thousands of VR headsets to children in public education Absolutely nothing makes the slightest lick of sense about the world. The economy is so terrible that cities are overcrowded after everyone abandoned the rural countryside to try and make a living, but millions or billions of people spend their lives in a glorified MMO. Elderly women go to virtual church instead of real ones, Wade's mom had both of her jobs in OASIS, virtual credits are the most stable currency, and any kid with a decent GPA (not high enough to get a scholarship) gets a virtual school with a free hookup. Even the poorest don't starve because they get government-subsidized meals, and in fact they have so much food that they still get overweight despite climbing the stacks every day! How does anything survive? Who stays outside the OASIS to keep a multinational conglomerate running? How many people are churning out headsets in China for millions of public school students? Who's running the farms for all those breakfast cereals and powdered eggs and milk? Oh yeah, and Wade mentions that stacks toppling over domino-style is not an uncommon occurrence. But they still think that's the best way to utilize real estate!
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 17:26 |
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Also apparently the OASIS is completely free to use if you have a headset, which leads to the question of who funds the servers and where do they get the energy to maintain a consistent virtual world for billions of people. It really raises the question of whats the point of the post-apocalyptic setting at all.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 17:43 |
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Also apparently the OASIS is completely free to use if you have a headset, which leads to the question of who funds the servers and where do they get the energy to maintain a consistent virtual world for billions of people. yeah, I haven't read the book but I don't get what would be all that different if it weren't just set in a whatever the word is for something that isn't dystopian or utopian future is (topian?) Like if someone created an amazing VR world right now, people would play it without having a hellscape to get away from, especially if some dickhead billionaire was offering his fortune to whomever had the best knowledge of 80s bullshit.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 17:53 |
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See, if it werent for the fact he objectively sees the oasis as a good thing, the author could have at least made the oasis the reason for society's collapse. Like, the world going to poo poo because everyone is addicted to a virtual paradise is way better of a concept than a magic vr heaven that somehow exists despite the state of the world.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 18:02 |
I read ahead and I’m going to combine the next two chapters because the meeting between Parzival and Aech is so loving annoying. Imagine two rear end in a top hat holier-than-thou nerds ribbing on each other and another dude for the whole thing and you’ve basically got it. It’s almost entirely pointless.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 18:09 |
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chitoryu12 posted:It’s almost entirely pointless. I think that's a pull quote from the back There is one chapter coming up I think you should just use the one sentence summary from Wikipedia to describe. Its a series of events so dumb that a dispassionate reporting of events is hilarious
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 18:12 |
So it turns out the book answers my question about the size of the planets soon: life-size. OASIS is set up like a Rubik's Cube divided into 27 cube-shaped zones, each of which is 10 light hours (or 10.8 billion kilometers) across. This gives the entire OASIS universe a span of 32,400,000,000 kilometers from end to end. "Sci-fi authors don't know numbers" continues to be true, because it's a virtual universe in the most literal sense. I don't even want to think about how much processing power it must be taking up.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 20:08 |
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Mostly depends on how much total area is being observed at a given time, and what’s in it. Universe size doesn’t really matter except as bragging rights.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 20:29 |
Subjunctive posted:Mostly depends on how much total area is being observed at a given time, and what’s in it. Universe size doesn’t really matter except as bragging rights. I think a number of players is specified as "millions", and there's thousands of planets (as will be explained, these include full simulated fictional universes like everything seen in Star Trek or all of the gaming space in World of Warcraft and Everquest). World of Warcraft maxed out at 12 million players with a much smaller space and graphics that could hardly be described as lifelike.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 20:45 |
Oh hey apparently it's billions of players. Simultaneously.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 20:57 |
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It's been awhile since I tore the book apart, so this might be wrong. I remember that the OASIS company subsidizes the basic rigs at an insanely low cost of five cents or around there. Supposedly, this is all because the founder wanted OASIS to be accessible to everyone. Nevermind that the entirety of it is apparently microtransaction hell. Except where it isn't. You can't go to other "planets," but you can access any number of bulletin boards and instanced private rooms. You're given enough money "to buy a short sword, wooden shield, and leather armor" but trapped on a welcome planet that has nothing to do on it. You don't unlock other planets, you have to pay for transport every time. Unless you get fuckoff rich and can afford your own ship. There's PvP, with death resetting your character. Which means the rich will always prey on the poor. And the poor will never be able to accumulate enough power without some insane injection like the Gunter quest. No I'm not having flashbacks to trying to go through Stranglethorn Vale on a PvP server way back when in Vanilla WoW. It feels like the plot was supposed to originally rely on one evil kid with the backing of IOI. Since the first key is (spoiler alert) on the public school planet, and that is supposed to be accessible only to students. Of course this is handwaved away in typical Clinian fashion. Again I may be misremembering things.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 21:18 |
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You wouldn't simulate the whole universe in high fidelity, just the parts people are playing in. That saves some computing power. Also, the graphics are probably handled client-side. WoW's graphics are simplified so that older computers can play it, not because it's easier on the servers. To be clear, we're still looking at a system that requires absurd computing power, not to mention network bandwidth (billions of players!) and data storage (lifelike, life-sized models are not small!). How do you even handle a planet? That's likely terabytes of data, if not more. Also, all these assets have to be created somehow. Are they computer generated? Are the planets created by what is essentially the Minecraft world gen algorithm? Or did someone make an entire universe by hand? In this apocalyptic world, how is there infrastructure to keep any of this running? I'm still shaking my head at the interaction with the bully. It's juvenile, but not high school juvenile; it's a nerd fantasy of shutting down the bully. And then he just mutes the guy anyway!
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 21:24 |
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Baron Corbyn posted:yeah, I haven't read the book but I don't get what would be all that different if it weren't just set in a whatever the word is for something that isn't dystopian or utopian future is (topian?) Because that wouldn't be the Last Starfighter but edgier enough.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 21:24 |
PJOmega posted:It's been awhile since I tore the book apart, so this might be wrong. No you've actually got it right. This gets covered in the next few updates, but I'm fine explaining it now because it really emphasizes how impossible the scale of this thing is. It'll also help us get back to plot faster because two chapters get dedicated to just establishing OASIS and how it works. OASIS costs only 25 cents as a lifetime sign-up fee, probably Halliday referencing arcade games only costing a quarter. However, everything in the game costs OASIS credits. Along with real world ways to earn money still working in OASIS (like selling services or getting sponsorships), you can earn credits and XP (which Cline keeps calling "XPs" and annoying the crap out of me) by completing quests and killing NPC enemies. GSS makes money by selling in-game items like avatar skins, vehicles, and teleportation services between planets. Wade's big problem is that you need to earn XP to increase your abilities like in any other game, but he has to spend most of his OASIS time in school. He's only level 3 because without any money he basically has to hitch rides with Aech and other gunters to low-level zones to scrape his way through the ranks. OASIS is so immersive because along with haptic feedback gloves, the visor beams the graphics onto your eyes with lasers to make it look like it's actually the real world around you. If it weren't for needing gloves and a visor, it would basically be the holodeck.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 21:31 |
Solumin posted:You wouldn't simulate the whole universe in high fidelity, just the parts people are playing in. That saves some computing power. Also, the graphics are probably handled client-side. WoW's graphics are simplified so that older computers can play it, not because it's easier on the servers. There's some mention of templates being used, but it really is as ridiculous as it sounds: a planet is a planet, without repeating terrain and simulated right down to every single blade of grass. From the way it's all described, the way OASIS looks in the movie (modern lifelike CGI) is actually how it's all supposed to look in the book. It's a wish fulfillment ultimate video game where anything and everything is possible and all your favorite fictional worlds are real.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 21:36 |
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Solumin posted:I'm still shaking my head at the interaction with the bully. It's juvenile, but not high school juvenile; it's a nerd fantasy of shutting down the bully. And then he just mutes the guy anyway! I gloss over that because it's so banal. And doesn't make any sense. If you mute someone all you're doing is stopping you from hearing them. Any bully worth their digital salt would size the opportunity to mock you as a performance piece so that everyone else would be laughing at you. And because you muted them you wouldn't even be able to counter their bullying. Not that anyone would be listening. Kids are social at school because they are, for lack of a better term, trapped there. We're already starting to see weird socialization patterns forming with access to smart phones at young ages. Imagine a world where anyone could, at any time, go and focus on something elsewhere. A world where hormones are completely borked because every visual representation repeats the porn addiction paradox of being the same and yet better than whatever was viewed thirty seconds ago. The kids in these virtual schools aren't connected by geography. Religion. Social class. Ethnicity. Nationality. Hell I don't even think they necessarily speak the same language (though of course either in OASIS English is the defacto language of trade or it's got some ridiculously capable translation systems). There is nothing tying these kids together in a world where they can simply mute one another. They aren't forced to interact for hours every day. All social activities after school take place off planet so only the thin veneer of social class pairing exists but that's almost wholly independent of school. Ugh.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 21:39 |
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Isn't it weird that Oasis is not really immersive then? You can use voice commands to move your character, he grabs his school books by tapping on them... It's not VR with haptic feedback -- which would be really interesting advances that wouldn't be out of place in a sci fi novel. It's more like Second Life.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 21:42 |
Solumin posted:Isn't it weird that Oasis is not really immersive then? You can use voice commands to move your character, he grabs his school books by tapping on them... It's not VR with haptic feedback -- which would be really interesting advances that wouldn't be out of place in a sci fi novel. It's more like Second Life. Reading ahead, it's really inconsistent. Everyone is still just sitting in their rooms (or in Wade's case, a freezing abandoned van with a rickety heater) wearing haptic feedback gloves and a visor. Even if they're touching everything through the gloves and having the images beamed onto their retinas, they should still feel everything in their real environment so Wade would be thrown out of immersion by going underwater or into a desert or snowstorm in the game. And obviously they don't feel anything that's not touching their hands. But the book seems to treat it like a holodeck in every sense. Cline forgets exactly how everything is being operated and has it feel like a full immersion brain-jack VR with a HUD.
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# ? Mar 13, 2018 22:19 |
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quote:At this school, the only real weapons were words, so I’d become skilled at wielding them. The beginning of the same loving paragraph posted:The ability to mute my peers was one of my favorite things
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 00:24 |
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So basically it comes down to Cline being an inconsistent writer who can't keep track of his own plot devices. Yeah, that's what bothered me so much!
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 00:53 |
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Mel Mudkiper posted:See, if it werent for the fact he objectively sees the oasis as a good thing, the author could have at least made the oasis the reason for society's collapse. If I'm remembering right, the Red Dwarf novelizations have something along these lines with Better than Life. Everyone who played it became addicted and had to be cared for like a baby because they wouldn't leave the game.
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 05:33 |
Baron Corbyn posted:If I'm remembering right, the Red Dwarf novelizations have something along these lines with Better than Life. Everyone who played it became addicted and had to be cared for like a baby because they wouldn't leave the game. Even the Pendragon Adventure series (literally for 13-year-olds) handled it better with their fourth book. One of the Territories was a futuristic one that had fallen into ruin because almost the entire population had decided to live in virtual reality forever, with only a small handful of people staying out to maintain the buildings they were in. A later book had them to go a Territory that seemed to be an isolated island with primitive technology, and it's revealed that it's actually the future of the previous Territory where they had gone full post-apocalyptic after the virtual reality broke down.
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 13:31 |
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Any sufficiently advanced technology or Cline premise is indistinguishable from magic.
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 14:05 |
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Baron Corbyn posted:If I'm remembering right, the Red Dwarf novelizations have something along these lines with Better than Life. Everyone who played it became addicted and had to be cared for like a baby because they wouldn't leave the game. Better Than Life! Yeah they play an updated version where you didn't just "wish for things" like in the episode, because that quickly got boring, but instead tapped into your subconscious desires and created a world so perfect you didn't even know you wanted it! It's been decades since I read it, but I can recall the scene where they finally "escape" was horrific with Lister and the Cat being basically mummified corpses who had been kept on the verge of life through a drip. Conjured images of that fella from Se7en. Real horrible. Know what else is real horrible? Ready Player One. I'm only echoing people here, but Christ... Cline doesn't have a clue when it comes to setting these things up. The post-apocalyptic thing makes no sense and if I recall correctly becomes a non-point later on in the book when Wade Boggs leaves the stacks. Like, he lives on pizzas that are teleported to him or something? I was thinking the same things as you lot, like if this game CAUSED the world to become lovely it'd give the entire book a bit of subtext, a bit more flavour, make it more interesting. Also what if Wade was already big into the 80s anyway BEFORE the Easter Egg hunt began? Like, tie it in with his dead ma. She was obsessed with the decade so it doesn't appear Wade has just jumped onto this bandwagon. (which, in itself, if handled right could be another clever bit of subtext or politcal commentary with everyone irl leaping onto 80s Nostalgia) The whole "training montage" bit is so stupid and ham handed. If you want this to play out like Young Adult Fantasy then THAT is what should make this kid special. He's already a huge 80s nerd and doesn't HAVE to research it because he lived it vicariously through his mother. Something. ANYTHING rather than what we got. And why DIDN'T he make the Oasis some kind of implant? Its Cyberpunk fantasy! Go hog wild with it. Do a Matrix thing and make up some bullshit about everyone's brain being the processor that lets the game run in the first place. Then you might have some stakes at least! Like the IOI can gently caress your mind if they... Sorry. Sorry. Getting carried away here. Thanks for the thread, dude. I bowed out of the book half way through (if that) but binged 327 pages and now I'm looking forward to slapping my forehead in disbelief along with everyone else.
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 15:06 |
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# ? Jun 1, 2024 05:58 |
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The thing is, I didn't really hate RPO until Armada came out Like, in pure isolation, RPO isn't that offensive of a novel A nerdy guy said "Hey, lemme write a dumb comedy novel about a guy who makes a universe of 80s references in a VR world and these nerds who have to prove to be the master of pop culture to win a trillion dollars." As far as dumb comedy sci-fi conceits go, its pretty tolerable. Hell, its not even like he Sanem'd his way into popularity. It organically became a big hit, and good on for him for that happening to him. Then he wrote Armada. Armada, I think, is when you realized he was actually an empty manchild raising pop culture knowledge to a sort of intellectual holy grail. You realized RPO wasn't a lark, it was a treatise. Like, rather than exploring other ideas, he decided he was gonna be the "80s nerd guy" forever. And thats when you can kind of go back and see RPO not as a cute novel in isolation but a relic of this sort of toxic self-absorbed "geek" culture.
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# ? Mar 14, 2018 15:21 |