An Audio-Book Review: Insert One Token to Continue Playing

Ready Player One

By Ernest Cline

Published by Random House Audio

Read by Wil Wheaton

(Note: Oops, nearly forgot to post this, so I’m a bit late, but better late that not at all, I guess.)

The Book:

I’ll admit it. I saw the movie first and did not realized it was an adaptation of a novel. I should have, though. Nearly everything these days is either an adaptation, a remake or thinly veiled rip-off of another more successful film. There are times I wish Hollywood would stop adapting novels, but only because it might be nice to see more original stories in the theaters. That’s neither here nor there, just an example of how quickly and easily I can go off on a tangent.

There are some differences between the movie and the novel. That’s normal. Movies, when you boil them down are best when adapting short stories and novelettes. They can handle that sort of story without having to cut out a thousand details that appear in any well-written novel. Naturally, however, movies tend to adapt novels so cuts must be made. In this case, whole situations got cut. Both versions of Wade are poor, but in the movie, he can still go anywhere he wants in the OASIS. In the novel he is initially stuck on the first world, Incipio (unless he can hitch a lift elsewhere) because while access to the OASIS is free, transport to the other worlds there is not, and then he is stuck on the world his OASIS-sponsored school is on (Ludus). Fortunately, the first key is hidden on that world, so game on!  No further spoilers, except I will admit it has nothing to do with racing backwards. Frankly, I found the “battle” for the first (Copper) key a more believable challenge, but it would not have been as exciting in a movie situation, unless you’re about my age and actually remember the 1980’s games involved.

I did note a few inaccuracies, such as all games being based on the quarter (the American quarter dollar coin, I assume). This was the traditional fee, especially in the old pinball machines and in arcade games you might find by themselves in a restaurant or supermarket, but many arcades switched over to using tokens very early on. I think there are some that use both, but tokens were in common use at least as much as quarters were in the 1980’s which everything in this book refers to. Perhaps Halliday was a purist who preferred the use of quarters, but I still think tokens probably should have at least been mentioned. There’s room for that in a book even if not in a movie.

The book is a much better story than the movie, by the way, and makes a better argument for why culture seems to be stuck in 1980’s retro-fashions. Simply put, it’s not. Only the “Gunters,” those trying to find Halliday’s Easter Egg and win the big contest, are paying much attention to the trivia of the 1980’s. Oh there’s a few hints that such 1980’s nostalgia has been fashionable off and on because of the hunt, but it becomes clear that while all the active characters are Gunters, they are a small minority of the people on Earth.

I did not, until now, however realize how dependent this scenario is on the preservation of digital data. It seems as though everything ever recorded is used in the book in some way or other, but I wonder how many of those recordings of ancient TV shows and the code of old video games will have survived the major upheaval the future world has gone through. A lot of those things are still really only available on DVD (or in some cases laser disc or VHS tapes (Don’t get me started on BetaMax) and all those media have a limited shelf life. It’s possible that the backup strategies by then will have become fool-proof but as an IT pro, I see far too many cases where backup strategies have failed. That might have made for an interesting hitch in the story, but maybe nothing will have been lost by then.

The story is a long one and the challenges facing the Gunters are more difficult than those in the movies. Take that silly race for the first key in the movie; would it really take years for someone to try driving backwards? I doubt it. In fact, I think after a few runs someone would have tried it just for the sake of doing something different or even just to be silly. No, in the book the challenges are all based on video games. You can’t drive backwards in a video racing game (or couldn’t back in the 1980’s) and many non-racing games continually progressed to the right of the screen with no going back (side-screen scrollers).

Well, I think it is obvious by now that I am finding fault in the movie than in the book. The book is fairly long stretched out story but a fairly engaging one and it held my interest even when I found myself groaning over the author’s choice of video game to use. So, yes, well played!

 

The Audiobook:

I have listened to two other books read by Wil Wheaton and did not like his reading at all. I was prepared to write another bad review about his too-fast reading speed and lack of ability to differentiate character voices, but this time he found a book he was ideally suited to read and read it well. The story is entirely told in the first person (Wade Watts aka Parzival) so he really only needed to use one voice. Even when someone else is speaking it comes to us via the first-person narrator so the fact they all sound alike works and It appears that Wil Weato9n is excellent at sounding like a videogame nerd/geek. The fast rate of speech is perfect for Wade’s enthusiasm, so well done, Mister Wheaton. My only complaint was that he sounded entirely too smug when he got to the point at which he was re-elected (along with Cory Doctorow) to be in charge of the OASIS government, such as it was. Actually, I doubt I would have voted for either of them, but it’s just a story. Still I couldn’t be sure that bit was not tossed in to convince Wil Wheaton to read the book.

So, all told, a long, but interesting story and was read quite appropriately by Wil Wheaton.