The Ready Player One backlash, explained

Steven Spielberg ’ s Ready Player One, an adaptation of the 2011 novel of the same name by Ernest Cline, is about to debut. And the internet is fix and waiting to tell him why that ’ s a awful theme .
“ Ready Player One is a awful reserve and it will be a awful movie, ” the Outline proclaimed .
“ many people find its accept on games and alleged genre art to be a numb, pandering tableau of character points as an end unto themselves, ” the A.V. Club informed .
Reading the end of Ready Player One, opined a writer for Tor, “ I felt like a kid who thinks eating an integral cake by himself sounded playfulness — I was brainsick of it, and craving something of real means. ”

A time traveler from 2011 could be forgiven for being deeply confused by this reply. In 2011, Ready Player One was beloved. It was “ a guarantee pleasure. ” It was “ witty. ” It was not only “ a simple moment of playfulness ” but besides “ a rich and plausible picture of future friendships in a earth not excessively distant from our own. ”
What gives ? How did the consensus on a single book go from “ ebullient and meaningful fun ! ” to “ everything that is wrong with the internet ! ” over the straddle of seven years ?
fortunately, there ’ s a perfect stepping stone that can help us understand precisely how this conversion happened. In 2015, Cline released his moment record, Armada, to a reception that looked a batch closer to the consensus on Ready Player One today than the consensus on Ready Player One in 2011. And that ’ s because in 2015, the eccentric residential district of the internet was still in the throes of the seismic event known as Gamergate .
Gamergate was a toxic cultural battle filled with harassment then evil it would become a major influence on the alt-right — but basically, it was about who gets to be a eccentric, which parts of geek identity are worth laud, and which parts are destructive. Gamergate changed the way we talk about geek culture, and in the end, it would make it borderline impossible to think about books like Ready Player One as harmless, meaningless fun .

When Ready Player One came out, it felt like an escapist fantasy for gamers

back in 2011, it was about impossible not to think about Ready Player One as harmless fun .
The premise is appealingly airheaded and insubstantial : It ’ randomness 2045, and the dystopian world has become intolerable. As an escape, most of humanity spends its clock time plugged into the OASIS, an expansive VR landscape that incorporates most of the twentieth and 21st centuries ’ pop culture into itself, thus that users can pilot the starship from Firefly to a Dungeons & Dragons castle .
The plot is more pleasant nonsense. The founder of the OASIS, James Halliday, has died, and he has left his fortune — and control of the OASIS itself — to the person who can track down an easter egg he ’ mho obscure inside the game. To find the egg, hunters ( gunters, in the parlance of the book ) will need an encyclopedic cognition of Halliday ’ s beloved 1980s pop culture. And our hero Wade, an 18-year-old video game addict from a preview park, is surely that he ’ randomness just the man to do it. He just has to find the egg before a massive corporation gets its hands on it rather, regulating away the exemption of virtual reality and ending the OASIS as Wade knows it .
What ensues is an exuberantly paced quest narrative that begs to be devoured like sugarcoat and refuses any hard questions or contemplation on the lector ’ s part. Why would you want to think about how potentially toxic empty nostalgia can be ? Ultraman ’ mho fighting Mechagodzilla over hera !
The write was never very good — it ’ south largely just long lists of pop culture references and Wade ’ sulfur impression as to whether the property in interrogate sucks or rocks — but for the kind of book Ready Player One is trying to be, that doesn ’ metric ton necessarily matter. The basal aesthetic pleasure here is one of realization : Yes, I know that reference, and yes, I agree that it sucks or rocks. And ready Player One is there to serve that joy to its readers on a silver phonograph record — assuming its readers are besides gamers obsessed with the bits of ’ 80s toss off culture that were built with adolescent boys in mind .
But the chief thing Ready Player One is doing is telling those ’ 80s-boy-culture-obsessed gamers that they matter, that in fact they are the most significant people in the universe. That knowing every single blasted discussion of Monty Python and the Holy Grail can have life-and-death stakes, because why shouldn ’ thyroxine it ? ( Yes, that is a crucial step in Wade ’ s battle to save the OASIS. )
For readers in Cline ’ s aim demographic in 2011, that message felt empowering. For readers who weren ’ thyroxine, it felt like a harmless musical composition of affirmation think of for person else. Everyone deserves a airheaded escapist fantasy, right ? And since Cline ’ s silly escapist fantasy wasn ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate specifically meant for girls — unlike, say, Twilight, which was getting savaged in democratic acculturation at the meter — Ready Player One was largely leave alone by the people it wasn ’ triiodothyronine built for. There was the occasional harsh slice of criticism from the in-group, but largely, the answer was welcoming. even the New York Times, which noted that “ gambling has overwhelmed everything else about this koran, ” gave it a aristocratic, by and large incontrovertible review .
Four years late, Armada came out to a very different reaction .

By the time Armada came out, Cline’s escapism had come to seem toxic

Armada, like Ready Player One, is chiefly a pitch mechanism for eccentric nostalgia and eccentric affirmation, only in this lawsuit it ’ s focused on extraterrestrial being invasion stories preferably than good ’ 80s toss off culture. ( Although this main fictional character, like Ready Player One ’ randomness Wade, does have an anachronistically encyclopedic cognition of ’ 80s stuff. ) It takes the premise that the video game diligence is actually a unavowed government strategy meant to train civilians to fight against an stranger invasion — therefore when the aliens come, gamers are the homo slipstream ’ randomness best promise of survival .
Over the course of the book ’ s inaugural act, 18-year-old Zack Lightman goes from nerdy senior high school school game to a captain in the Earth Defense Alliance, adored by all for his video crippled art and provided with not merely his favorite snacks and gaming music but besides a specially bred filter of pot designed specifically for gaming. “ All those years I spent playing videogames weren ’ triiodothyronine wasted after all, eh ? ” he crows to his beget. ( cline loves the son eh. His characters all sound vaguely canadian because of it. )
The aesthetic pleasure hera is the like as it was in Ready Player One — “ I get that reference point ! ” — and indeed is the central estimate : that gamers have the electric potential to be the most important people in the universe. But in 2015, readers no long welcomed such pleasures with universally exposed arms .
The Washington Post dismissed it as “ nostalgic narcissism. ” The A.V. Club found it “ depressing. ” Armada was a dull retread of Ready Player One, critics opined, filled with off-putting nerd gatekeeping and lists of better and more concern stories rather of any original ideas of its own .
“ It ’ mho as though Willy Wonka made you prove you knew the chemical composing of nougat before he let you into the chocolate factory, ” The Verge complained .
The most oft-cited and profoundly damning Armada review was at Slate, by Laura Hudson ( now an editor program at Vox ’ s sister site The Verge ). “ The shameless, insubstantial wish-fulfillment of the book burns hot and brilliantly, ” she wrote, arguing that Armada was “ cringingly frightful and guileless ” in its “ intemperance, ” and that Cline ’ randomness condition as the ideal of nerd culture “ should be troubling to anyone who identifies with the label. ”
For Hudson, the vacate nerd nostalgia that Cline ’ sulfur exploit champions points to something toxic in nerd culture itself. “ It ’ s a valuable interrogate for gaming culture — and ‘ swot polish ’ more generally — to ask itself, ” she wrote : “ Do we want to tell stories that make feel of the things we used to love, that help us remember the reasons we were so drawn to them, and create new works that inspire that flush of devotion ? Or do we simply want to hear the litany of our childhood repeated back to us like an endless lullaby for the perch of our lives ? ”
Hudson doesn ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate citation Gamergate by name, but that ’ s the elephant in the room hera. Gamergate is why the perniciousness of swot culture is a more-than-reasonable peg for a review of a bible like Armada in 2015. It ’ mho why, at the time, people were thinking a lot about the perniciousness of swot acculturation in general. And it ’ s why, four years after the introduction of Ready Player One, it was no longer easy to think of Cline ’ sulfur nostalgic, nerdy fantasies as harmless .

Gamergate is about gatekeeping. So is Ready Player One.

Gamergate ’ south origins are nebulous and contradictory, as competently outlined by my colleague Todd VanderWerff. What ’ mho crucial for the Ready Player One conversation is what Gamergate had evolved into by 2015, and that is : angry gamers ( largely young, straight white men ) lunge mistreat at their targets ( largely women ) in the name of a kind of swot honor.

That abuse took the human body of graphic rape and death threats, sometimes thus detailed and specific that some of the women targeted by Gamergate went into hide. occasionally, Gamergaters would send SWAT teams to their targets ’ homes ( a democratic troll tactic that has led to end in at least one case ) .
It was all a particularly evil and brutal kind of gatekeeping. Gamergate ’ sulfur targets were primarily people who were concerned in performing feminist critiques of television games or in making nontraditional video games for women or disable people or people of color. For this, packs of angry nerds decided that they must be punished .
acculturation writers who think a batch about nerd culture were profoundly shaken. They started to write think pieces about how nerd culture could have become so profoundly toxic, so profoundly misogynous and destructive, that it could birth a campaign like Gamergate .
“ There ’ s a fundamental miss of empathy or agreement for other human beings at play hera, ” argued Andrew Todd at Birth Movies Death. “ These people live in a fucked-up alternate universe where everything is done for the lulz, or to win points in some kind of psychopathic game of one-upmanship. What we ’ ra see is the gamification of a social struggle. ”
At Destructoid, Jonathan Holmes pointed the finger at “ the opinion of elitism. The mind that there are certain kinds of gamers that deserve to take pride in that name, and others that should be ashamed. The procedure of establishing superiority over another group of gamers by belittling them. ”
“ By the turn of the millennium, ” wrote Leigh Alexander at Gamasutra, the cultural imperatives of gaming were : “ Have money. Have women. Get a grease-gun and then a bigger gun. Be an friendless. Celebrate that. Defeat anyone who threatens you. You don ’ t need cultural references. You don ’ t need anything but gaming. ” Those imperatives, she concluded, would create “ an amorphous cultural condition that was iniquity and loudly on the outside, hollow on the inside. ”
And unfortunately for Cline, his influence reads like a collection of all the aspects of nerd culture that critics have come see as a engender ground for Gamergate .

How Gamergate killed Ready Player One

Both Wade and Zack follow Alexander ’ s imperatives like they ’ rhenium checking them off a list : They start off inadequate but then make millions from their video games. They earn cool hack girlfriends like trophies. They get guns, and then bigger guns. Their cultural references are valuable strictly for their use in gaming — any culture that exists outside of their video games might vitamin a well not exist. And gleefully, they celebrate their outcast condition .

Ready Player One pic.twitter.com/Li8Y8DuB6L— harpy in a housecoat (@chachch_changes) March 11, 2018

“ I was besides weird, even for the creep, ” Wade announces at the begin of Ready Player One. His school doesn ’ thymine “ get ” him, so he heads to the OASIS. There, his ’ 80s pop culture cognition ensures his high social status, and his debates with his best friend — over which ’ 80s properties rock and which suck — are considered “ high in entertainment value. ” When a fellow musician dares to question his cognition, Wade is able to beat him into submission under a stream of trivium ( “ You ’ re holding Swordquest : Earthworld. … Can you name the following three games in the series ? ” ) until his rival “ lowers his head in shame ” and the watch, awed herd “ bursts into applause. ”
The world of Cline ’ s escapist fantasy is a world of elitist gatekeeping. It is a earth in which a person ’ second respect is determined by their cognition of esoteric cultural triviality, where those of lesser value must be defeated and wiped aside, and where gambling is all that matters. And, crucially, it is a populace specifically for straight white men .
Cline ’ s cultural references are all aimed at boys. The pop polish of the ’ 80s that ’ randomness built for girls — like Jem and the Holograms or The Baby-Sitters Club or the american Girl dolls — has no station here .

Can you imagine how shittily men would treat fix Player One if it was all femme stuff ?

“ I arrived in my flying model of the Thelma & Louise car. I ’ d installed a Polly Pocket splashboard AI, and, to complete the attend, slapped some Lisa Frank dolphins on the outside ” pic.twitter.com/oAl6V2jSJD— jane frie(n)dhoff (@JFriedhoff) December 11, 2017

There are girls in his universe. Wade ’ s best friend has a white male avatar but is secretly a black lesbian, a revelation to which Wade reacts by deciding that it does not matter because he doesn ’ t even see people ’ randomness race, sex, or sex. It ’ s a enactment that reads unusually like the “ I don ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate care if you ’ ra black, blank, greens, or purple ” actor’s line, and that carries the lapp basic trouble : wade should care that his best friend is a black lesbian because those are crucial facts about his best acquaintance ’ sulfur life. But in this world, they ’ rhenium unimportant, because only things that affect directly white dudes in truth matter .
And then there ’ second Art3mis, Wade ’ s love pastime. Art3mis is angstrom flat as a newspaper dame, a character who exists entirely as a pry who will reward Wade when he proves his masculinity. certain, we ’ re told that she ’ randomness firm and chic and a big game — but she ’ randomness never allowed to be such a good crippled that she poses a substantial menace to Wade. Her bet on skills are good commodity adequate to make her a worthy prize for our hero, unlike other girls, who we are given to understand are airheaded and conceited. ( Wade is constantly comparing the avatars of other girls unfavorably to Art3mis ’ s effortless cool, an attitude you can see repeated in some of Cline ’ s old poetry. )
And Wade wins her by hunting. Art3mis repeatedly tells Wade that she ’ s not concerned in a quixotic relationship, but Wade wears her down in the end by swerve force of his nice-guy doggedness. “ She ’ s basically a NPC [ non-player character ], ” concludes Beth Elderkin at io9 .
All of these issues may have seemed trivial or insignificant pre-Gamergate — but by 2015, that was no long the case. immediately, they were all many critics could see when they looked at Cline ’ mho work. What used to seem playfulness and bubbling and harmless in Ready Player One was dead ; Gamergate killed it .
To be fair to Cline, at no compass point does his oeuvre back harassing women or minorities or suggest that Gamergate was a super-good idea that ’ s just been tragically misunderstood. So to some readers, the persistent affiliation of his work with Gamergate seems to be both a reach and basically unjust. Why can ’ t they good read a playfulness speechless illusion about gamers saving the world without feeling like they ’ re somehow endorsing rape threats ?
“ Hey, guess what ? ” wrote Chris Meadows at TeleRead. “ Many of us who abhor Gamergate are however crippled nerds ourselves, and we actually can enjoy reading about video recording gamers being depicted as amazing while silent feeling that women are people and worthy of respect, besides. ”
And of course you can read ready Player One as a fun dense fantasy. No matchless ’ south stopping you ! But Cline ’ randomness world is not barely one in which gamers get to be amazing, but besides one in which gamers get to be awesome specifically because everyone else sucks. It ’ s a world in which women are trophies, the concerns of straight white men are all that matters, and the greatest possible calling of anyone ’ second life is the rote memorization of trivium at the expense of all else.

cline does gesture at the theme that there is a world outside of video games. Wade is briefly embarrassed and depressed by the animation he ’ s built for himself — one of full isolation, in which he never leaves his icky apartment with its blacked-out windows because he ’ second excessively busy searching for Halliday ’ s egg. And when he encounters Halliday ’ s avatar in the OASIS, Halliday passes on some words of wisdom to him : “ As terrific and afflictive as world can be, ” he says, “ it ’ s besides the only place where you can find genuine happiness. Because reality is real. ”
But the moment reads as brim service, because Ready Player One ’ s affection has no clock time for the world outside of video recording games, not actually. It ’ s besides busy nerding out over how freakin ’ cool it is that Ultraman is fighting Mechagodzilla and a kid is saving the news by reciting every goddam password of Monty Python and the Holy Grail .
And in a pre-Gamergate world, the plain gloat and fun of moments like that were enough to make the dark underbelly of the fantasy vanish and carry Ready Player One to the heights of cultural phenomena. But post-Gamergate, the colored underbelly has become all besides apparent. The fun international relations and security network ’ t quite enough to carry the koran anymore — so immediately the burden is on Spielberg ’ s forthcoming movie to overcome its Gamergate baggage .

reference : https://gametracker.one
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