Mel Mudkiper posted:

C. Why do they even care about the money when they also get control of OASIS, and ergo, the ability to produce unlimited amounts of the worlds most valuable currency at will?

chitoryu12 posted:

I mean you'd still end up with inflation if you did that (the "Why don't they just print more money?" argument to solving poverty and paying the national debt), but this thread will not actually end with the finale of the book!

chitoryu12 posted:

Andy Weir, author of The Martian, loved the book so much that he wrote a fanfic from the antagonist's perspective. Ernest Cline in turn loved the fanfic so much that he declared it canon. Once the book proper ends, we'll finish the Let's Read with Lacero and learn the real motivation behind everything.

Choco1980 posted:

wait, if the cave was a "no PVP" zone, how could she shove and punch him?

Memento posted:

Yeah you look at the Secret Finding Discord for WoW, those people are organising and weaponising their efforts to find some insanely obscure poo poo. They might not be finding things that are as complicated as this poo poo, but there's only a few hundred of them doing it with any dedication. There are supposed to be millions of these hunters and some of them have the money of a multi-national corporation behind them. How the gently caress didn't they find it 17 hours after it was announced?

PJOmega posted:

Cline should've had it be a madcap race with only kids able to participate due to the first key being on an age locked planet. Have the contest be announced at most weeks before, and the protagonist being a nerd who was "born in le wrong generation" who was obsessed with the 80s.

Instead the world makes no sense and trying to make it make sense is rather pointless.

Adnachiel posted:

It's not to transport humanity. Just him, his friends (presumably just Aech at this point) and some scientists and doctors.


Art3mis, meanwhile, wants to use the winnings to solve world hunger as a starting point for fixing the planet. He scoffs at her for being too optimistic.


Wade's a little poo poo.

steinrokkan posted:

My only question is

Why, in an age of perfected VR, does anybody give even the tinies gently caress about some beep boop toaster games from the 80s / 90s, even 00s?

Movies I can accept.

steinrokkan posted:

My only question is

Why, in an age of perfected VR, does anybody give even the tinies gently caress about some beep boop toaster games from the 80s / 90s, even 00s?

Movies I can accept.

quote:

It took me a little over an hour to make my way back through the tomb and up to the surface. The instant I crawled outside, a MESSAGES WAITING indicator began to flash on my display. I realized then that Halliday had placed the tomb inside a null-communication zone, so no one could receive calls, texts, or e-mail while they were inside. Probably to prevent gunters from calling for help or advice.

I checked my messages and saw that Aech had been trying to reach me since the moment my name appeared on the Scoreboard. He’d called over a dozen times and had also sent several text messages asking me what in the sweet name of Christ was going on and screaming at me in ALL CAPS to call him back right now. Just as I’d finished deleting these messages, I received another incoming call. It was Aech trying once again to reach me. I decided not to pick up. Instead, I sent him a short text message, promising to call as soon as I could.

As I ran out of the forest, I kept the Scoreboard up in the corner of my display so I’d know immediately if Art3mis won her Joust match and obtained the key. When I finally reached the transport terminal and jumped into the nearest booth, it was just after two o’clock in the morning.

I entered my destination on the booth’s touchscreen, and a map of Middletown appeared on the display. I was prompted to select one of the planet’s 256 transport terminals as my arrival point.

When Halliday had created Middletown, he hadn’t placed just a single re-creation of his hometown there. He’d made 256 identical copies of it,spread out evenly across the planet’s surface. I didn’t think it would matter which copy of his hometown I went to, so I selected one at random, near the equator. Then I tapped CONFIRM to pay the fare, and my avatar vanished.

A millisecond later, I was standing inside a vintage 1980s phone booth located inside an old Greyhound bus station. I opened the door and stepped out. It was like stepping out of a time machine. Several NPCs milled around, all dressed in mid-1980s attire. A woman with a giant ozone-depleting hairdo bobbed her head to an oversize Walkman. A kid in a gray Members Only jacket leaned against the wall, working on a Rubik’s Cube. A Mohawked punk rocker sat in a plastic chair, watching a Riptide rerun on a coin-operated television.

I located the exit and headed for it, drawing my sword as I went. The entire surface of Middletown was a PvP zone, so I had to proceed with caution.

quote:

Looking around, I wondered why Halliday, who always claimed to have had a miserable childhood, had later become so nostalgic for it. I knew that if and when I finally escaped from the stacks, I’d never look back. And I definitely wouldn’t create a detailed simulation of the place.

I glanced over at the bulky Zenith television and the Atari 2600 connected to it. The simulated wood grain on the Atari’s plastic casing perfectly matched the simulated wood grain on the television cabinet and on the living room walls. Beside the Atari was a shoebox containing nine game cartridges: Combat, Space Invaders, Pitfall, Kaboom!, Star Raiders, The Empire Strikes Back, Starmaster, Yars’ Revenge, and E.T. Gunters had attached a large amount of significance to the absence of Adventure, the game Halliday was seen playing on this very same Atari at the end of Anorak’s Invitation. People had searched the entire Middletown simulation for a copy of it, but there didn’t appear to be one anywhere on the whole planet. Gunters had brought copies of Adventure here from other planets, but when they tried to play them on Halliday’s Atari, they never worked. So far, no one had been able to figure out why.

I did a quick search of the rest of the house and made sure no other avatars were present. Then I opened the door of James Halliday’s room. It was empty, so I stepped inside and locked the door. Screenshots and simcaps of this room had been available for years, and I’d studied all of them closely. But this was my first time standing inside the “real thing.” I got chills.

The carpet was a horrendous mustard color. So was the wallpaper. But the walls were almost entirely covered with movie and rock band posters: Real Genius, WarGames, Tron, Pink Floyd, Devo, Rush. A bookshelf stood just inside the door, overflowing with science-fiction and fantasy paperbacks (all titles I’d read, of course). A second bookshelf by the bed was crammed to capacity with old computer magazines and Dungeons & Dragons rule books. Several long boxes of comic books were stacked against the wall, each carefully labeled. And there on the battered wooden desk in the corner was James Halliday’s first computer.

Like many home computers of its era, it was housed in the same case as its keyboard. TRS-80 COLOR COMPUTER 2, 16K RAM was printed on a label above the keys. Cables snaked out of the back of the machine, leading to an audio cassette recorder, a small color television, a dot-matrix printer,and a 300-baud modem. A long list of telephone numbers for dial-up bulletin board systems was taped to the desk beside the modem.

quote:

I quickly lost track of time. I forgot that my avatar was sitting in Halliday’s bedroom and that, in reality, I was sitting in my hideout, huddled near the electric heater, tapping at the empty air in front of me, entering commands on an imaginary keyboard. All of the intervening layers slipped away,and I lost myself in the game within the game.

In Dungeons of Daggorath, you control your avatar by typing in commands, like TURN LEFT or GET TORCH, navigating your way through a maze of vector-graphic corridors while fighting off spiders, stone giants, blobs, and wraiths as you descend deeper and deeper, working your way down through the dungeon’s five increasingly difficult levels. It took a while for the commands and quirks of the game to come back to me, but once they did, the game wasn’t that difficult to solve. The ability to save my place at any time basically gave me infinite lives. (Although saving and reloading games from the tape drive proved to be a slow and tedious process. It often took several attempts and a lot of fiddling with the cassette deck’s volume knob.) Saving my game also allowed me to log out for bathroom breaks, and to recharge my space heater.

quote:

I reached the last level of the dungeon around four o’clock in the morning and faced off against the Evil Wizard of Daggorath. After dying and reloading twice, I finally defeated him, using an Elvish Sword and a Ring of Ice. I completed the game by picking up the wizard’s magic ring, claiming it for myself. As I did, an image appeared on the screen, showing a wizard with a bright star on his staff and his robes. The text below read: BEHOLD! DESTINY AWAITS THE HAND OF A NEW WIZARD!

I waited to see what would happen. For a moment, nothing did. Then Halliday’s ancient dot-matrix printer came to life and noisily ground out a single line of text. The tractor feed spooled the page out of the top of the printer. I tore the sheet off and read what was there:

CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE OPENED THE FIRST GATE!

I glanced around and saw that there was now a wrought-iron gate embedded in the bedroom wall, in the exact spot where the WarGames poster had been a second before. In the center of the gate was a copper-plated lock with a keyhole.

I climbed up on top of Halliday’s desk so I could reach the lock, then slid the Copper Key into the keyhole and turned it. The entire gate began to glow, as if the metal had become superheated, and its double doors swung inward, revealing a field of stars. It appeared to be a portal into deep space.

“My God, it’s full of stars,” I heard a disembodied voice say. I recognized it as a sound bite from the film 2010. Then I heard a low, ominous hum,followed by a piece of music from that film’s score: “Also Sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss.

I leaned forward and looked through the portal. Left and right, up and down. Nothing but an endless field of stars in all directions. Squinting, Icould also make out a few tiny nebulae and galaxies in the distance.

I didn’t hesitate. I jumped into the open gate. It seemed to pull me in, and I began to fall. But I fell forward instead of down, and the stars seemed to fall with me.

Orthodox Rabbit posted:

Wouldn't it have made more sense for the rich nerd guy to use a d&d reference as his first test as something that he actually had a hand in? Like a module he helped write or a famous dungeon he once made for his friends or something that was an important memory from his childhood? It seems strange that the first of his big important tests just takes place in a dungeon he played with his friends once I guess. And that way his entire test couldn't be outsmarted by just downloading a pdf of the tomb of horrors Prima strategy guide. But I guess that wouldn't tick off the [ X ] DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS NERD REFERENCE box quite as well.

Wade says he finds a ton of gold coins in the tomb which automatically converts to a bunch of OASIS money. But he can only pick up so much of it and that's why he doesn't just make himself filthy rich off of it. But since it automatically converts he doesn't actually need to exchange the gold anywhere to make credits from it so why can't he just pick up an assload of it? Or come back later and just keep picking up more and more to make himself a ton of money?

He also says picking up the money gives him a bunch of experience. Which is fair because that's how it worked back in old d&d. But does this mean that it works like that everywhere in OASIS? The rich automatically get to be level 50000 and broke people are level 3 scrubs? Or does experience only work this way because he's in a d&d area? In which case why wouldn't people find a game area with rules that give out incredible amounts of easy exp because that's how it worked in those games and just power-level this way. Which if this is true it means that he must be really really dumb if he's still only ever made it to Level 3 over the course of his life.

This was thinking into this terrible book way too much but his lovely throwaway nerd lines don't make any sense with what he's written about OASIS.

iospace posted:

The thing is, I can sort of see where he was coming from in this. Tomb of Horrors is relatively well known, even by those who don't play DnD. So it allows him to make a DnD reference and not have it be obscure enough to fly over heads.

Never mind that when he does make the more obscure references he explains them right away.

E: My eyes rolled so far back when it was "WE SHALL BATTLE... by playing Joust!"

Orthodox Rabbit posted:

You're right, but that just makes Halliday even lamer. Instead of using his basically infinite wealth and resources to make challenges and tests that force the Gunters to understand his actual life, they only need to just memorize assloads of pop culture. The tests don't seem to actually have anything to do with Halliday himself except that X Nerdy Item existed at the same time he did.

iospace posted:

Have you seen the price of NES games and consoles these days? That's not even getting into the (S)NES Classics selling out practically instantly.

Deptfordx posted:

I can't believe they're going to use the Tomb of Horrors in the film.

It's Speilberg, it'll be something more visually interesting surely.

Nipponophile posted:

Unfortunately, the review I read said all the challenges have been completely replaced from the book, so no lich-jousting.

Tunicate posted:

well if they remove like 98% of the book the movie might be okayish

Orthodox Rabbit posted:

Wade says he finds a ton of gold coins in the tomb which automatically converts to a bunch of OASIS money. But he can only pick up so much of it and that's why he doesn't just make himself filthy rich off of it. But since it automatically converts he doesn't actually need to exchange the gold anywhere to make credits from it so why can't he just pick up an assload of it? Or come back later and just keep picking up more and more to make himself a ton of money?

He also says picking up the money gives him a bunch of experience. Which is fair because that's how it worked back in old d&d. But does this mean that it works like that everywhere in OASIS? The rich automatically get to be level 50000 and broke people are level 3 scrubs? Or does experience only work this way because he's in a d&d area? In which case why wouldn't people find a game area with rules that give out incredible amounts of easy exp because that's how it worked in those games and just power-level this way. Which if this is true it means that he must be really really dumb if he's still only ever made it to Level 3 over the course of his life.

Nipponophile posted:

Unfortunately, the review I read said all the challenges have been completely replaced from the book, so no lich-jousting.

Adnachiel posted:

Later plot points aside, nothing stops him from doing that. And the only thing stopping the rest of the player base from doing that is the fact that Cline underestimates the problem-solving abilities of the Internet. Or even just the ability of a MMO's player base to figure out how to game the system.

If the OASIS were real, a group of players would have already found the best place to farm gold. (Possibly from one of the modules on Gygax, since it can be safely assumed some of those dungeons operate under a similar or the same ruleset.) Or even just created a place full of unguarded piles of the stuff since player-created content is a thing. Then it's just a matter of going back there every day after the servers reset and loading up again. There's no need to farm monsters and battle other players. All you need is to spend money for the transportation fee and boom, you're set for life. (And I believe it's mentioned at least once in the book that the OASIS has no "global" rules or administrators keeping people from trolling others or taking advantage of loopholes other than creating multiple accounts to get around losing all of their progress upon death.)

Mind you, if this got out to the rest of the player base (and it would) it would cause hyperinflation and quickly destabilize OASIS credits as a currency. If the government actually wanted to remove competition from the Dollar, well...

anilEhilated posted:

The soundtrack to Ladyhawke is great and I am perfectly willing to challenge anyone who disagrees to a Pong duel to the death. Or something.

e: Wait, it's not even to the death, is it? Whatsherface has lost to the lich countless times, right? Is there any consequence to losing?

Orthodox Rabbit posted:

Thats a good point. This tomb of annhilation gold and teasure automatically converts to OASIS credits. And since credits are better than real money this dungeon is full of more money than one person can carry. Is it only worth real money because its an "official" area or does any treasure acquired anywhere in the OASIS covert to real money? Whats stopping people from just poopsocking the world of warcraft land to make tons of realworld cash and moving from a 22nd floor trailer to a 3rd floor trailer?

quote:

I found myself standing in an old video arcade, playing Galaga.

The game was already in progress. I had double ships and a score of 41,780 points. I glanced down and saw that my hands were on the controls.After a second or two of disorientation, I reflexively began to play, moving the joystick left just in time to avoid losing one of my ships.

Keeping one eye on the game, I tried to make sense of my surroundings. In my peripheral vision I was able to make out a Dig Dug game on my left and a Zaxxon machine to my right. Behind me, I could hear a cacophony of digital combat coming from dozens of other vintage arcade games. Then, as I finished clearing the wave on Galaga, I noticed my reflection in the game’s screen. It wasn’t my avatar’s face I saw there. It was Matthew Broderick’s face. A young pre–Ferris Bueller and pre-Ladyhawke Matthew Broderick.

Then I knew where I was. And who I was.

I was David Lightman, Matthew Broderick’s character in the movie WarGames. And this was his first scene in the film.

I was in the movie.

I took a quick glance around and saw a detailed replica of 20 Grand Palace, the combination arcade/pizza joint featured in the film. Kids with feathered ’80s hairstyles were clustered around each of the games. Others sat in booths, eating pizza and drinking sodas. “Video Fever” by the Beepers blasted out of a jukebox in the corner. Everything looked and sounded exactly as it did in the movie. Halliday had copied every last detail from the film and re-created it as an interactive simulation.

Holy poo poo.

I’d spent years wondering what challenges awaited me inside the First Gate. Never once had I imagined this. But I probably should have. WarGames had been one of Halliday’s all-time favorite movies. Which was why I had watched it over three dozen times. Well, that, and also because it was completely awesome, with an old-school teenage computer hacker as the protagonist. And it looked like all of that research was about to pay off.

quote:

Making it all the way to the end of the movie wound up being a lot harder than I anticipated. It only took me about fifteen minutes to figure out the“rules” of the game and to sort out how the scoring system worked. I was actually required to do a lot more than simply recite dialogue. I also had to perform all the actions that Broderick’s character performed in the film, in the correct way and at the correct moment. It was like being forced to act the leading role in a play you’d watched many times but had never actually rehearsed.

For most of the movie’s first hour, I was on edge, constantly trying to think ahead to have my next line of dialogue ready. Whenever I flubbed a line or didn’t perform an action at the right moment, my score decreased and a warning flashed on my display. When I made two mistakes in a row, a FINAL WARNING message appeared. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I got three strikes in a row, but my guess was that I’d either be expelled from the gate or that my avatar would simply be killed. I wasn’t eager to find out which it would be.

Whenever I correctly performed seven actions or recited seven lines of dialogue in a row, the game would award me a “Cue Card Power-Up.” The next time I blanked on what to do or say, I could select the Cue Card icon and the correct action or line of dialogue would appear on my display, sort of like a teleprompter.

During scenes that didn’t involve my character, the simulation cut to a passive third-person perspective, and all I had to do was sit back and watch things play out, sort of like watching a cut scene in an old videogame. During these scenes, I could relax until my character came on-screen again. During one of these breaks, I tried to access a copy of the movie from my OASIS console’s hard drive, with the intention of playing it in a window on my display so I could refer to it. But the system wouldn’t let me. In fact, I found that I couldn’t open any windows at all while inside the gate. When I tried, I got a warning: NO CHEATING. TRY TO CHEAT AGAIN AND IT’S GAME OVER!

Luckily, it turned out that I didn’t need any help. Once I’d collected the maximum of five Cue Card Power-Ups I began to relax, and the game actually started to be fun. It wasn’t hard to enjoy being inside one of my favorite flicks. After a while, I even discovered that I could earn bonus points by delivering a line in the exact tone and with the same inflection as in the film.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d just become the first person to play an entirely new type of videogame. When GSS got wind of the WarGames simulation inside the First Gate (and they did a short time later), the company quickly patented the idea and began to buy up the rights to old movies and TV shows and convert them into immersive interactive games that they dubbed Flicksyncs. Flicksyncs became wildly popular. There turned out to be a huge market for games that allowed people to play a leading role in one of their favorite old movies or TV series.

quote:

The NORAD command center erupted in celebration, and I waited for the movie’s end credits to roll. But they didn’t. Instead, all the characters around me vanished, leaving me alone in the giant war room. When I checked my avatar’s reflection in a computer monitor, I saw that I no longer looked like Matthew Broderick. I’d changed back into Parzival.

I glanced around the empty NORAD command center, wondering what I was supposed to do next. Then all of the giant video display screens in front of me went blank, and four lines of glowing green text appeared on them. It was another riddle:

The captain conceals the Jade Key

in a dwelling long neglected

But you can only blow the whistle

once the trophies are all collected

quote:

From there, I teleported back to the transport terminal next to my school on Ludus. Then I went to my locker and dumped all of my avatar’s newfound treasure, armor, and weapons inside before finally logging out of the OASIS.

When I pulled off my visor, it was 6:17 a.m. I rubbed my bloodshot eyes and gazed around the dark interior of my hideout, trying to wrap my head around everything that had just happened.

I suddenly realized how cold it was in the van. I’d been using the tiny space heater off and on all night and had drained the batteries. I was way too tired to get on the exercise bike and recharge them. And I didn’t have the energy to make the trek back to my aunt’s trailer, either. But the sun would be up soon, so I knew I could crash there in my hideout without worrying that I would freeze to death.

I slid off of my chair and onto the floor, then curled up in my sleeping bag. As I closed my eyes, I began to ponder the riddle of the Jade Key. But sleep swallowed me whole a few seconds later.

I had a dream. I was standing alone in the center of a scorched battlefield, with several different armies arrayed against me. An army of Sixers stood in front of me, and several different gunter clans surrounded me on all other flanks, brandishing swords and guns and weapons of powerful magic.

I looked down at my body. It wasn’t Parzival’s body; it was my own. And I was wearing armor made of paper. In my right hand was a toy plastic sword, and in my left was a large glass egg. It looked exactly like the glass egg that causes Tom Cruise’s character so much grief in Risky Business, but somehow I knew that, in the context of my dream, it was supposed to be Halliday’s Easter egg.

And I was standing there, out in the open, holding it for all the world to see.

In unison, the armies of my enemies let out a fierce battle cry and charged toward me. They converged on my position with bared teeth and blood in their eyes. They were coming to take the egg, and there was nothing I could do to stop them.

I knew I was dreaming, and so I expected to wake up before they reached me. But I didn’t. The dream continued as the egg was ripped from my grasp, and I felt myself being torn to shreds.

chitoryu12 posted:

steinrokkan posted:

My only question is

Why, in an age of perfected VR, does anybody give even the tinies gently caress about some beep boop toaster games from the 80s / 90s, even 00s?

Movies I can accept.

Sperglord Actual posted:

Oh hey it's that one alien from Galaxy Quest.

chitoryu12 posted:

Holy poo poo.



Also Wade gets stopped from cheating here, but in some future challenges he cheats a lot. He only succeeds because he has walkthroughs or outside assistance, all while decrying the antagonists for doing the same.

Orthodox Rabbit posted:

That's how he even made it to the first challenge to start with. He just read all the maps and dungeon master information out of the tomb of horrors book. The only time he doesn't cheat is when he's blocked from doing so.

It says a lot about Wade's lack of actual personal character that in the same breath he basically says "Wargames was Halliday's favorite movie. Thus its my favorite movie."

Deptfordx posted:

It might be hyperbole to say that whole Wargames section was the worst thing I've ever read. But off the top of my head I can't think of anything worse.

Goddamn.