Ready Player One

On today's edition of "What is Fodder reading now?", I'll be talking about Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. I bought this book in August last year, because of a comment I read on reddit, and it has been sitting there on my Kindle until someone from work mentioned it and I thought I should finally check it out.

The story is set slightly into the future, where the energy crisis has resulted in a crapsack world. Most people escape by entering a virtual world called OASIS, which sounds like a much more advanced version of Second Life. There's a virtual economy in the game, arena-style e-sports, and even an online school with credits that actually count for primary school / high school education.

One of the creator of OASIS, James Halliday, was a huge fan of the 80s. When he died, he had no next of kin, so he created a game within his game, The Hunt for Halliday's Egg. The person who manages to find the egg will inherit his entire fortune - several billion dollars. Finding the egg involves finding three keys, which open three gates.

This spawns an entire subculture of people called "gunters", short for Egg Hunters, who are furiously trying to find the egg. They study Halliday's life, and anything to do with the 80s, in the hopes of finding a clue that leads towards the Copper key - the first of the three keys.

I started pretty slow, as the story explains how things got to be the way that they were, and explains how the OASIS works. There are a lot of references to 80s culture, especially 80s nerd culture: anime, gaming and music. It wasn't until about halfway through the book where it got to the "I don't want to put this down" stage, which was tough, as I was reading it during my lunch break at work and when I got to that point, I looked at my watch and realised I only had about 5 minutes left until I had a meeting. I was pretty tempted to skip the meeting, but I did the responsible thing and put it down. I finished the rest of it after work, plowing through 25% of the book as soon as I got home.

The thing I liked most about the story was that it was a typical hero's journey, except the hero wasn't your typical hero. It never felt like the main character was the one destined to do great things. In fact, during the story, you meet other characters who seem equally as likely to end up the victor at the end of the book.

One other thing I really liked about the story was how the author dealt with one of the "female" characters. Her avatar is a young female, and the main character is in awe of her, possibly even in love with her. But throughout the story, he constantly questions himself, and whether he would still love her if he found out she was in fact an overweight, middle-aged man - since in the OASIS, anyone can look however they want, that's what makes it such a great equaliser.

The whole girl gamer thing is something I don't really like talking about much. I think it's great to be able to be a rolemodel to girls who are interested in going into technology, or who want to play games but feel like they would be shunned for it, but it's really draining being the poster child for diversity. I want to be treated as just another programmer, and just another gamer. It's one of the things I really love about where I work - I've only felt like "the girl" a handful of times, and thankfully, the people who treat me that way are far enough removed from my everyday work that I rarely have to see them. The other devs on my team make jokes at my expense, and treat me like any other person.

Now that I'm a lot older, or maybe it's because the playerbase has matured somewhat, I find that I'm getting less of the "OMG, it's a gurl!!!!" response. But whenever it happens, I feel like I need to temper people's expectations. I still remember deciding whether to show up to the Tuesday night WoW dinners, as I was worried people would hate me after meeting me.

As unfair as it is, I feel like a lot of the time, people find out I'm a girl, and they build this image of me as some hot girl who plays games. Despite the fact that it's statistically unlikely that I would be hot (simply based on the % of people who are attractive), I get the impression that people project an image of whatever they find attractive on me. Then, if they ever meet me, they are inevitably disappointed that I don't look like what they imagined.

For a long time, I tried to keep their expectations low, telling them that I'm overweight, not great looking, etc. Even when I was incredibly overweight, they would reply, without even having met me, that I was probably exaggerating, and women have too much pressure on them to be skinny anyway, so it doesn't matter that I don't look like a stick figure. Which was kinda nice to hear, but hard to tell if they were being sincere, or just trying really hard to hold on to that fantasy image they had of me. It was pretty frustrating sometimes - I'm not being modest, WHAT IS IT GOING TO TAKE TO BURST YOUR BUBBLE?!

Then I had a friend tell me that the reason he wanted to meet me IRL wasn't because he was hoping to start a romantic relationship with me, but because he really enjoyed talking to me, so he just wanted to hang out (he was a dirty Alliance player, so all our talking was over MSN, and quite staggered as I'd either be raiding, in a PvP group, doing dungeons or questing). He also said that I never purposely led them on to believe I was a supermodel, in fact, I did the opposite. If they wanted to believe that, and then feel upset that I shattered their reality by not living up to that dream, then that was their fault, not mine.That seemed like a pretty fair stance to have, so I adopted that. (Though the people-pleaser inside me still felt bad every time I wasn't able to live up to their expectations.)

Since I'm no longer looking for a romantic partner, it's probably easier for me not to care what other people think of my appearance. Especially people I meet in games. Plus, the chances that I'll see one of the randoms I play with in Dota 2 again are pretty low. Looking through my teammates list, the random I've played with the most, who isn't a friend of a friend is some person named "Super Bogan" that I've played with 8 times. I don't remember them, and I doubt they remember me.

Wow, once again, I took a really huge detour from my original topic. I didn't want to spoil the story in the book anyway. Oh, but the guy from work told me that they're making a movie of the book and it's going to be directed by Steven Spielberg. They didn't want it to clash with the new Star Wars movie, so it was postponed to March, 2018. I'm super hyped for the movie now, though I'm still going to avoid trailers like the plague.