Let's Read Ready Player One - The Ultimate Showdown as a book

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Let's Read Ready Player One - The Ultimate Showdown as a book

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

Uh...Acerak's not even a level check, he's a puzzle boss.

For someone as steeped in the 80s as Cline seems to be you'd think he'd figure that out.

Acerak also famously doesn�t have a body, being only a jeweled skull, but... well, we�ll get to that in a bit.

I think that the book is worth hating because, when you dig past the references into the implied morals, it�s actually enormously contemptible if not downright evil. The book is fundamentally narcissistic on a level normally only seen in the Trumps.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2018 17:48

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 06:57

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

chitoryu12 posted:

I think the best way to do it would be either:

1. Have the Joust game played up with dramatic music, beading sweat (on Acererak too), and Edgar Wright-style rapid cuts.

2. Have no music whatsoever and just have the sounds of the game for the entire sequence, including when Wade and Acererak awkwardly shuffle around to switch sides. Make it the lamest thing possible to put to film.

The obvious thing in a filmwould be to have the Joust game be, y'know, an actual game of Joust; Wade fighting Acerak with lances while aboard a giant ostrich-thing.

I mean, when I picked up the book because people were talking about it, I just kind of assumed that's what it would be about, because that's what it says on the back: Wade Watts enters a fantastic VR world to experience video games in real life. And that's fine; I'm not proud. I read lovely novels all the time. I would have been okay with a book about guys flying X-wings into gundams, or whatever the gently caress seems to be going on in RPO the movie. And then you read the book, and he is literally playing an arcade game in VR: he is using an advanced piece of fantastical computer technology to painstakingly simulate the experience of slinking around the dim and stinky corner of a bowling alley with the loser middle-school friends that he's not actually cool enough to have.

It would be a fantastic one-off joke to subvert natural audience expectations, if it were in any way a joke or the author were capable of understanding another human being well enough to judge what their expectations would be. But unfortunately, spoiler alert, this is how every single challenge in the book plays out. Just like this. Literally just playing 80's arcade games on 80's arcade consoles and quoting lines from movies verbatim until he is rewarded with money and fame and pussy.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Well yeah but if we had to hate every book that appealed to the selfish narcissism of white male nerds we'd have to take a torch to sci-fi and fantasy in general

Nah, this is a lot worse than most, both because it's surprisingly popular and because Cline is much much worse about it than all but the most dire white male nerd fantasists. He has drilled white male nerd fantasy to its hollow quaking bones. He is to nerd fantasy what John Ringo and Tom Kratman are to jock fantasy.

Like, check it out; traditionally, even the most sketched-in, hackneyed, paper thin power fantasies at least pay lip service to the idea of the Hero's Journey of Self Discovery, but Cline doesn't even do that much. You can see him cludgily stealing the framework of such stories from other media, but he does so in such a half-assed way he wrecks them utterly. Take Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, a movie this book is often compared to because they start from similar premises. If RPO was just a bad copy of Willy Wonka, that'd be all right. But it actively undermines the main thrust of WW's moral, and it does it in an amazingly toxic way. In Willy Wonka, Wonka's factory is presented by its quirky creator as a fantasy dream-land, but it's actually a kind of moral crucible, weeding out the bad, selfish, arrogant, and greedy children with hidden traps until only Charlie, who displays optimism, tenacity, and honesty, is rewarded for his purity of spirit by gifts beyond his wildest dreams.

Halliday's Puzzle at first looks like a similar set up, with one major difference; there's no moral crucible. There's no value judgment whatsoever. The whole idea of moral value judgments seems toxic to Cline. The quixotic mystery man at the heart of the story is literally doing exactly what he said he was: testing his audience's tolerance for rote memorization of useless trivia and capacity for obsessive compulsion. It is a game that can only be won by being as good at the video games of Halliday's childhood as Halliday was. The ultimate prize, complete control over a billion dollar corporation, goes to the person most capable of narcissistic emulation of a man trapped in a vision of his own past. Think how creepy that is: to live your life entirely within the shadow of someone else's childhood, and then imagine what it would be like to voluntarily dive into that fate. Wade Watts doesn't prevail in the end because he's pure of heart, or because he has unique talents or insights, or because he learns the power of friendship, but because he's the biggest, nerdiest, hikikomori-est loser in the world.

The fundamental message of the book is that if you ignore your friends and the outside world and keep doing exactly what you've been doing and don't change in any way, you too can earn a billion dollars and be famous and gently caress the nerdy non-threatening girl next door.

Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Mar 15, 2018

# ¿ Mar 15, 2018 21:42

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

Oh, man. Wait until you get to the famous "Discreet Openings" section!

Party Plane Jones posted:

like yikes, ernest cline

I think the thing that offends me the most is that you can't knock any protons off of a hydrogen atom, you colossal sack of dipshit.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2018 22:23

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

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.

Without getting too deep into it: that is Halliday�s life. He is exactly that shallow and stunted.

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.

That�s Gen Xers trying to recapture their youth, though. There�s no reason anyone born two generations later should care.

It would be like me obsessing over Howdy Doody dolls and red rider B.B. guns.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2018 19:39

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

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?

If you lose to the lich, he hits you really hard: hard enough that it would have killed Wade, but not so hard that it would have killed Art3mis. Also, you can't play him again until the dungeon resets. By the time the lich has reset, Art3mis has regained her HP. The lich is never a danger to almost anyone capable of finding and entering the tomb.

The book spells it out exactly that dryly and clinically. Cline's ability to immediately undercut all tension the very second he half-way creates some has to be seen to be believed. He is just the worst.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2018 22:11

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

iospace posted:

The what?

Don't worry. The openings are very discreet.

roomforthetuna posted:

It seems weird to me that people in this thread are like "this book is poo poo and stupid, how did it get so popular?!"
The answer is pretty much in the question. Large numbers of people are poo poo and stupid, and like poo poo, stupid things.
For example, Captain America: Civil War made more money than Watchmen. Cap isn't a badly made movie, but it is a very well-made stupid poo poo movie for the masses.
Cline managed to tap into this market by being, himself, a poo poo, stupid person, and writing what he knows. A book for people who wouldn't normally read a book.

No. I like schlocky fiction. I have a very high tolerance for schlocky, bad fiction. This is on a whole other level of badness. It is sub-Koontz. It is lower than Dan Brown. This book is more poorly written than Twilight. It is, hands down, the worst written professionally produced and edited novel I have ever read.

And it's not just the general populace; this was generally well received by critics. It made numerous "Year's Best" lists. The Onion AV Club gave it an A rating. The New York Times praised the "breadth and cleverness of Mr. Cline�s imagination". It is loving baffling, as if the entire population of literary critics was gripped by a low grade fever and a concussion during 2011.

Also: Civil War is much more competently executed movie than Watchmen, so that's kind of a dumb comparison.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2018 02:16

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

Wapole Languray posted:

I don't think that he actually likes any of this stuff. Like... there's no passion or interest in it at all. Why does he write about this? he obviously doesn't give a poo poo about a single one of these subjects.

Other than retro arcade and home computer games, where he does seem to possess a fairly deep well of knowledge, Cline's actual knowledge about 80's subject matter comes across as surprisingly shallow. He thinks Highlander is an obscure reference. He fucks up really basic dungeons and dragons facts. His Star Wars stuff seems confined solely to reading the IMDB quotations page for the original trilogy. I don't think he knows any comic book characters not in the Avengers or Justice League. The whole realm of "Girls Stuff" 80's nostalgia is a closed book to him.

Also, I don't think we've hit a single Nintendo reference in the entire book so far, which is absolutely shocking in its absence. Not one "It's a me, Mario!"

And that's fine; God knows we don't need more references in the book. But it does say something about the author.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2018 14:22

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

Liquid Communism posted:

Better question. If IoI has that much money and power in the real world, why do they give a gently caress about Halliday's game when they could be buying Senators and controlling the game via FCC regs for vastly less.

Or just goldfarming until they break the economy.

President Wil Wheaton would have prevented this.

^Not a joke.^

# ¿ Mar 18, 2018 04:43

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

Deptfordx posted:

As someone who played a lot of D&D in the 80's, this leapt out to me as well.

"as her D&D character, Leucosia"

Singular? They were archetypal playing D&D every night they could and overnight at the weekend D&D 80's nerds and she only had one character in all that time.

Tbf, I suppose she might have insisted on playing the exact same character with the same name for every game, which I've never encountered, but have heard about people doing anecdotally. I'm sure you can imagine the sort of person who'd do that.

That's a real thing for people who started playing D&D in the 70's and for people who learned the game from those people; the game back then was more of a tournament style puzzle-quest, and people treated their characters like self-inserts and loot-collectors that they would carry around from table to table. Most people would play different characters from time to time, but each would also have "their character" usually their favorite and highest level one, that they would use whenever they could get away with it.

Some of the earliest ones became famous when their authors wrote role-playing supplements and used them as NPCs, which is why you still have things in the PHB named after Drawmij (Jim Ward spells backwards), Mordenkainen (Gygax's character), Melf the Elf (Gygax's son's character) , etc.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2018 13:26

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

Sperglord Actual posted:

Oh no, what unseen peril will now obstruct Ser Parzival of Neckbearde on his quest and what feats of rote memory and munchkinism will carry him past it?

Whatever you were imagining the reveal on this to be, the reality is much, much dumber.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2018 21:42

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

iospace posted:

Uuuuuuuuuuuuugh transphobia.

Oh, it gets worse.

There's a certain character that i have a lot to say about, but I'm holding on until it comes out in the story.

chitoryu12 posted:

Spielberg apparently changed every single challenge. According to early reviews, one of them is finding out that Halliday went on a date once with a girl to see The Shining and having to find a copy of her in the Overlook Hotel, including dealing with elevator blood flooding it.

yeah,I called it a long time ago that this would happen, although that one sounds like a neat twist.

There's so many staged film junket bits of Stephen Spielberg calling Ernie Cline a "visionary" at this point that it just makes you want to cry.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2018 21:37

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

Chef Boyardeez Nuts posted:

I feel like she has to be who she is for Cline's self insert narrative.

The creepiest part is how you can feel Cline congratulating his authorial stand in for being attracted to someone of "rubenesque" stature.

It's also hilarious how Wade is shocked every single time at the thought that someone's online persona doesn't match their real life physical state, despite A) tweaking his own avatar and B) interacting with the world solely through the internet.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2018 02:38

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

Mr. Sunshine posted:

The writing in RPO reminds me of nothing so much as Fifty Shades. The events described in both works could, in themselves, be exciting/tense/erotic etc, but the actual words used to describe them are so unimaginative that it just comes out as "and then this thing happened, and then this happened and...".
Now, in defense(!) of E.L. James, at least she actually describes the events taking place in Fifty Shades, while Cline just tells us it happened post-fact.

What really bugs me is not only the constant nerd-culture references, but the fact that Cline rarely offers up anything more than the name of the thing he's referencing (and sometimes which movie or game it's from). Don't know what the hell a Zenith television looks like, or what a TRS-80 is? Congratulations, you have no way of visually parsing the scene. When Wade enters the Tomb of Horrors, Cline doesn't describe the things he encounters, he just goes "and once I was past the Orb of Annihilation I did..." and if you don't know what the hell an Orb of Annihilation is, you're just poo poo out of luck as a reader.

You should try reading Armada, Cline's sophomore book, in which he has to try at every turn to describe things which the audience is not familiar with without having handy 80's references to fall back on.

If you thought his prose was bad in RPO, it's one hundred times worse in Armada.

quote:

William Gibson has this style where he writes about some strange, sci-fi thing - but since it's an everyday item to the characters in the story, he doesn't actually describe the thing until details become relevant for the story. Cline's like that, only he fails to realise that's what he's doing.

William Gibson also has this thing here he can pinpoint the exact perfect ancillary detail the audience needs to sketch in a character and only ever give you that, to the point where he can tell you everything you need to know about a character's personality by describing the branding of their pants or the color of their suit or the way they smoke a cigarette. Or the way that one character's alcoholism is portrayed, not by having them drink excessively, but by the way they constantly orient their POV descriptions around the presence or absence of a bar in a room.

William Gibson is loving amazing, is what I am saying.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2018 22:25

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

Dienes posted:

Does he actually try to do that? I'm pretty sure he does the exact same thing. "They looked like the drop ships from Avatar or Edge of Tomorrow!"

Oh he does, to a painful extent -- apparently the UN steals all their starship designs from Stanley Kubrick -- but the nature of the novel means that he actually has to try and create characters and alien entities himself, and it's absolutely painful.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2018 01:08

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

Proteus Jones posted:

WHERE ARE HIS EYELASHES

They're there, they're just almost the same color as his skin. Red hair and a ruddy complexion is a bad combo.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2018 02:42

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Like, Cline just up and asks us to believe a military force on-par with Seal Team 6 is totally into referencing obscure 80s movies to each other and snacking on cheetos during games of DnD

That is basically accurate to my experience with military vets of all kinds. The military is 80% dumb goons, and Dungeons and Dragons is a cheap and low tech way to waste time during the many, many, many long hours of nothing that occur on base.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2018 09:07

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

Ixjuvin posted:

The most irritating part of this whole book to me is that I am convinced that Cline himself hasn't touched a loving video game since the mid 80s and knows exactly as much about MMOs as the Wikipedia article told him. (XPs!) Fossil-tier console and arcade games are the only things he ever played, and as a child at that; he doesn't have the tiniest inkling of how things have advanced in the past forty years beyond "they look SO REAL now!"

Hell, he barely even mentions Nintendo games, which is half or more of all 80's video game nostalgia. Just imagine Wade patiently over-explaining that when Halliday says Final Fantasy 2 ("Fainaru Fantajī II") he actually means the Japanese version of Final Fantasy 2 ("Fainaru Fantajī II"), and not the American version of Final Fantasy 2 ("Fainaru Fantajī Fō").

You can actually zero in on Cline's personal interests pretty quickly, from the book, as 80's computer console and Atari games, japanese tv shows, and prog-rock. It's the only area of the books where he actually reaches for any kind of deep cuts, as opposed to the shallow knowledge he shows all the other times.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2018 23:34

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

chitoryu12 posted:

Also, I was given a recommendation from Back Hack to tackle Monster Hunter International next. This was an easy solution, partly because I could get a Kindle copy for free and partly because this is the synopsis:

And this is the author bio on Amazon:

Fair warning; those books are worse than RPO. I made it half-way through RPO, but I bailed on MHI after a chapter when they made the first Sluggy Freelance reference.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2018 21:53

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

huh posted:

There's enough about this book to hate without pulling out the racism card.

Racism (and sexism and classism) is all through it, though. From Aech's reveal, which is the biggest load of performative anti-racism "tolerance" that actually ends up being waaaay more racist and sexist than if it had just been racist and sexist, to Daito and Shoto's introduction, where Cline expects you to provide your own gong sound effect.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2018 05:15

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

chitoryu12 posted:

Also not only are Daito and Shoto the only Japanese characters in the entire book, Shoto never changes his �honorable samurai-san� personality after Daito dies, which means he�s 100% serious about this. Wade successfully appeals to them by referring to Japanese properties with their Japanese pronunciation and making a big ceremony of offering them Japanese items in game.

It�s like if they had an African gunter and his avatar just wore a cheetah loincloth and said �bunga bunga� while spearing Sixers.

Cline has the same approach to ethnicity as the Superfriends cartoon show; all non-Americans speak in stilted English except for occasionally changing one of the words to being a word from their home language, usually one of the five words the audience might have heard before.

Other than Aech, are there even any black characters in the novel? Which would mean, functionally, there's no black characters in the novel?

Ironically, Armada has the literal exact same ethnic makeup for its cast; everyone is white except for two asian male characters and one black female teenager.

chitoryu12 posted:

Actually yeah, why didn’t Wade just tell Og “IOI is using hacked rigs, which is explicitly against the ToS and grounds for a permaban”?

Was it ever said that the helluva rigs IOI used were illegal? Wade considers it cheating, but Wade's a moronic hypocritical dipshit who also cheats all the time anyway -- fully half the challenges are solved by him just reading a walkthrough he pulls up on/offline, because Halliday/Cline loves text adventures, the most cheatable of games -- so I'm not sure if it counts. There's no functional difference bewteenw aht IOI does and the big Gunter guilds, or the High Five for that matter, pooling knowledge and resources.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2018 03:08

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

burial posted:

I guess I figured the biggest sin IOI committed (in the realm of cheating the TOS) was account sharing/letting more than one user control a particular avatar.

That�s bannable.

I mean, if it were against the rules, they already would have been banned for it; IOI doesn't even try to hide what they're doing. They even have serial numbers for names.

Which is dumb, again, because any actual evil corporation would never do that; they'd generate an ethnically and sexually diverse team of fake Gunters with marketing-approved looks, names, and gimmicks, all portrayed by paid actors when not actively gunting so that when and if they won they'd be able to bank on the publicity and sell merchandise and movie rights. That would have not only been more realistic, it would have made for a better series of antagonists, since there would have been actual characters with actual dialogue and personalities in competition with the main character.

Earnest Cline's a real bad writer, y'all.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2018 03:41

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

Chin Strap posted:

I finished 372 Pages, and now I want more. Are there any other good bad book podcasts? I know of the myriad of bad movie ones but I kind of enjoyed the long form of this.

Along with the other ones mentioned, I like The Worst bestellers because they often approach things from a queer/feminist direction and they have a habit of reviewing lovely Christian and Right Wing bestsellers that other shows miss.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2018 20:52

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

Choco1980 posted:

It's already been mentioned that Cline chose the 2000s Mechagodzilla with very little research. Boy didn't he research though. Kaiju and giant robot/sentai stuff is extremely nerdy about the exact size measurements of their embiggened combatants. It takes next to no research to find out exactly how tall each of the bots used in the big battel are, and a Reddit user did just that with this handy graphic:

Kiryu being "twice" as tall as Leopardon? No, they're the same height. Ultraman comes up to about Kiryu's armpit. Raideen to its chin. It is about twice as tall as Aech and Art3mis's mechs at least.

Also regarding the final challenge, I do like that in a room full of Halliday's retro games, he had to go reenact the very first video game easter egg, that's actually clever. However, him just instinctively knowing how to do it (and knowing to login to the mainframe with the D&D name of the girl Halliday Nice Guy'd) just ruins it by removing all tension or deduction from the scene. Ugh.

He also mentioned that there are Evangelions there, then apparently forgot about them. Evangelions are up to 200m tall, so approximately 4x the size of the other mechs. Also, they're literally invulnerable to anything that isn't an actual, honest to god biblical Angel, up to and including nukes.

You'd think that they would do more in the fight.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2018 21:06

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

EVGA Longoria posted:

And the Evas are wildly differently sized throughout the show, ranging from 40m to 200m based on height of background stuff. The movies settled on 75m, which would make them taller than anything else, too.

I actually really respect Gainax for just not giving two fucks about having a consistent size (or stats, or on-model appearance) for Evas, given what Evas are or what the show turned out to be about. It just makes it amusing when nerds mash a metaphor for human isolation and feelings of societal alienation into nerd-fights with other giant robots.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2018 02:13

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

Young Freud posted:

if you think that the Armada adaptation is going to be close to anything to the book. It's going to have the basic premise but everything else will be crafted by another screenwriter.

The basic premise is literally just The Last Starfighter.

Actually why not just remake The Last Starfighter?

# ¿ Apr 4, 2018 03:29

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

I could also see Aech in a Gundam Heavyarms (EW, obviously) for maximum dakka.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2018 00:57

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 06:57

Old Kentucky Shark: May 25, 2012; If you think you're gonna get sympathy from the shark, well then, you won't.

Malachite_Dragon posted:

Except the target audience itt isn't clapping, we're demanding blood

Also, the movie actually did really poorly in America, home of the source of its pop culture references. So hardly anyone was clapping*.

*except China and Korea, who inexplicably loving love this movie.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2018 09:05

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Let's Read Ready Player One - The Ultimate Showdown as a book