Monkey Robot

Ready Player One: Twilight For Nerds

2012-01-16T17:16:00-05:00

If you’re a geek with a soft spot for old video games and 80s nostalgia, you’ll love Ernest Cline’s debut novel, Ready Player One. While I enjoyed this novel—I polished it off in about a week, and afterwards felt like it was one of my favorite new books of 2011—I belatedly realized that I am not the target audience. The book certainly isn’t bad, but it has enough problems that, despite the fun I had while reading it, I’m hesitant to call it great.

(Warning: there are some spoilers in the remaining paragraphs, so read at your own peril. This review is more for people who have read the book, or have absolutely no plans to do so, I suppose.)

Firstly, Ready Player One is entirely too predictable; it’s a feel-good novel whose ending you can see coming from the first third of the book. Partly this is due to the fact that the novel relies too heavily on deus ex machina. I appreciate that the novel is an homage to cyberpunk stories of yore, and spins a classic David-versus-Goliath story, but you can tell from the beginning that the good guys are going to win, even though it seems practically impossible for them to do so. As a result, the ending is not only thoroughly predictable, but incredibly implausible as well.

I could get over that fact if the rest of the story had been suspenseful, but it was not. Ready Player One is told almost like a classic video game, its progress marked by preordained “boss fights”; but these boss fights are over within a couple pages, and it seems like Wade, the main character, barely has to put any effort into them whatsoever. I never really felt like the characters were in any real danger; they were all so powerful that it seemed unlikely that they could lose. And by the end, I realized that Cline was making liberal use of deus ex machina, so they weren’t in any danger. The climactic points were fun to read, but not really all that exciting.

Partly this was due to the fact that, like most cyberpunk novels, Wade triumphed because of brains, not brawn. In this case, though, Wade wasn’t so much cunning as possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of 80s pop culture. The protagonist literally triumphed by knowing how to beat arcade game bosses and memorizing the lines to WarGames. Had Ready Player One been more MacGuyver-esque, it could’ve been interesting, but instead it was snippets (sometimes running into several pages) of 80s trivia. Interesting, and perhaps exciting if you’re into that period of time, but ultimately it felt a bit flat.

Not as flat, though, as the characters themselves. Wade Watts is a classic Mary Sue. He’s an overweight nerd, as knowledgeable about the 80s as he is not about women, who spends all of his time online. He falls in love with a girl, who we are told, is awesome and cool and beautiful, save for a port-wine stain on her face that makes her self-conscious; of course, no one else but the protagonist has been able to see beyond her birthmark to the beauty inside. Yeah, we get it: the main character is more deep and caring that everyone else in this girl’s life, and we should file him under “S” for “Sensitive Nerd”, or perhaps “P” for “Perfect Boyfriend”.

The thing that annoys me most about the characters—particularly Wade—is that they never really grow. And why should they? They’re never really tested. They never have to overcome anything. The only really bad thing that happens to Wade is that his family is killed in the beginning—but in true cyberpunk style, he wasn’t close to his family, and, in fact, his family’s death enables him to spend all his time online, so no skin off his back. The only dramatic way the protagonist changes is that he gets in shape; but, of course, he gets in shape by literally working out while playing a video game, so he doesn't even have to struggle with that. He may as well have taken a magic pill that made him thin and muscular.

I’d talk about the other characters’ transformations, but they're so thin and cookie-cutter that we can’t even really see how they change because we barely even know them.

So why did I like Ready Player One? I really had trouble answering that. Scrutiny shows that the novel is mostly drivel, but damn, I had a lot of fun reading it. I honestly enjoyed plowing through the pages. Sometimes it even kept me up at night. These discordant feelings gnawed at the recesses of my mind.

That’s when it hit me: Ready Player One is basically Twilight for people who spent their summers at math camp.

Bear with me: Twilight is popular with young women (and middle-aged women…) not because the prose is florid or the story is original, but because it tickles a romantic part of their brains and also provides suspenseful fodder. It says, hey, you can be just how you are—insecure, unsure of yourself, maybe not the prettiest woman out there—and you’ll still have guys fighting for you. When scrutinized, the message in Twilight is unrealistic, and maybe even dangerous (do you really want a creeper like Edward interested in you?) but it still stimulates that part of the brain searching for romantic validation and excitement. It’s obviously an exciting and fulfilling read, if one that shouldn’t be take seriously.

Ready Player One does the same thing, but for geeks. It says, hey, do you spend all your time online? are you an organic encyclopedia of 80s knowledge? do you worry that you’re not really good enough and you’re never going to get the girl of your dreams? Never fear, because you can save the world and get that girl without changing who you are! And if you’re a nerd of the overweight variety, you can even shed some extra pounds by playing video games!

Unrealistic? Absolutely. And taken to the extreme, the underlying message in Ready Player One, like that of Twilight, is even dangerous. You won’t save the world from your parents’ basement. You can’t expect some girl to fall into your lap just because you’re you’re the only one to see past her (minor) flaws. You won’t get rich just by spending all your time jacked into the Internet. But hey, it’s a nice idea, right? If not taken literally, it’s okay to indulge yourself in that fantasy for a few hours.

Ready Player One and Twilight are the potato chips of the literary world: delicious, filling, but not to be eaten for every single meal, and not to be taken as seriously as spinach.

My Occupy Wall Street Strategy

2011-10-21T15:39:00-04:00

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past month, you’ve no doubt heard of the Occupy Wall Street protest taking place in Manhattan’s Financial District. Although the goals of the movement are broad and even a bit vague, the technique is pretty concrete: protests, marches, sit-ins, civil disobedience, and the infiltration and capture of Brooklyn Bridge, the most evil icon of financial greed in New York. While the movement is getting a lot of attention, you have to wonder how much change it can really effect, hamstrung as it is by the need to remain a peaceful protest.

To the Wall Street protesters, I say: you need a new strategy. Think bigger! A chunk of the protesters should get jobs in finance and infiltrate the banks à la Fight Club, using their newfound positions to sow chaos. Swap the morning coffee for decaf. Put tacks on everyone’s chairs. Fill up the handset of bankers’ desk telephones with a new dime each day, and then suddenly remove them all.

One thing I learned as a writer for a college newspaper: it’s the little things in life that matter. Slowly but surely, the little flaws make you go insane.

Fucking with the coffee isn’t nefarious enough? Well, let me throw this down on the stoop and see if the cat licks it up: back in September, a rogue trader for UBS lost $2 billion for the bank. Why don’t a couple finance-minded protesters get jobs as traders and make some risky transactions? Sure, such antics could ruin the economy again, but bankers would be shitting their pants worrying about the possibility of moles within their company. To paraphrase Julian Assange, the best way to make an organization ineffectual is to constantly make it shit its pants.

Of course, none of those strategies deal with the corruption of the Brooklyn Bridge. For that, I have no solution.

Business Ventures

2011-08-31T23:36:00-04:00

In the last few weeks I’ve had a number of stunningly grand ideas for potential business ventures. Maybe my brainstorms are due to the festering influence of my alma mater’s business school, or maybe they’re the machinations of the true genius that lurks inside my cranium. I’ve filed these under “C” for “Crazy Ideas I Had Once”, but I’ve realized I have neither the time nor venture capital to fully embrace these schemes, so I offer them to you, the Internet community, in the hopes that someone, somewhere, can make them a reality. In no particular order:

Tiny Giraffes: Wouldn’t your life be better if you had a pet giraffe? Wouldn’t your life be great if your giraffe fit into the palm of your hand? I’d sponsor a genetic engineering research firm to develop small giraffes to be sold in boutique pet stores. Obviously this idea would require the greatest amount of angel funding, but I think it has the highest potential ROI of all my schemes.
MyColonoscopy.com: A social networking site for colonoscopy patients. They could publish colonoscopy videos and share survival stories.
A bar called No Exit: A dimly lit, shady bar with lots of nooks and crannies—perfect for drinking alone. Its tagline would be “Hell is other people.”

A Tree Falls in Brooklyn

2011-08-29T11:49:00-04:00

Despite all the death, destruction and carnage that Hurricane Irene wrought on New York City, I am still alive.

I like to chalk my survival up to my exemplary (and mature) preparation skills. I had a bottle of Pepsi, three bags of potato chips, fresh mozzarella balls, a jar of Goober Strawberry, granola bars, and a fifth of Jameson whiskey. Theoretically I could still cook if the power went out, but I’d have to light my stove by hand, and high school chemistry class taught me that I’m not dextrous or competent enough to light burners with a match, so I stocked up on things I could eat right out of the packaging. I had Tupperware full of potable water. I was five feet away from the evacuation zone. I was prepared.

Truth be told, I survived because Hurricane Irene turned out to be more like Lame-icane Irene. After a week of hype from meteorologists, Irene brought little more than a bit of howling wind and buckets of rain to my fair borough. I think I saw more “destruction” in the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan about seven years ago. Which is anticlimactic, because I was prepared, damn it. Now I’m left with a jar of Goober Strawberry that I’m never going to eat.

I should’ve seen this coming. I spent all last week deriding the meteorologists. I grew up in central Pennsylvania, so I’ve learned to disregard storm warnings. Every winter, Pennsylvanians get themselves in an apoplectic fit worrying about a blizzard, ransacking local grocery stores for bread and milk and toilet paper just in case they’re trapped in their warm little houses for a few days by snow. And the storms never wreak that much havoc. The roads are plowed within a few hours. Shit, last winter, I was actually trapped inside my apartment in Brooklyn for longer than I’d ever been trapped in Pennsylvania. At a party on Friday night, I met a fellow who was in one of the evacuation zones (he lived by the piers in Williamsburg), and we mocked the storm. But I think a small part of us still worried that maybe—gasp!—we’d be without electricity for a couple days.

But no. The storm only left me with barely-palatable foodstuffs.

My neighborhood did suffer one casualty, however: a downed tree that blocked the road until a squad of New York’s finest chainsawed it into manageable pieces. Even that was lackluster, though; the tree went down not with a crack but with a timid pop, and not even until five o’clock or so in the afternoon, long after the brunt of the storm had passed.

I guess, after all the worry, even the tree felt like it had something to prove.

My Political Platform

2011-08-22T20:49:00-04:00

With the 2012 presidential campaign season rapidly approaching, I can’t help but notice that there are no candidates espousing my personal preference for a political platform. It is a niche that I think deserves to be filled, and I’d like to take a moment to outline my proposed platform, were I rich enough to enter into the presidential race. I welcome any suggestions as to whether these ideas are crazy or not.

Prohibiting Marriage

Everyone is up in arms over the gay marriage debate. My own state, New York, recently legalized gay marriage, but many states in this great Union have explicitly forbidden it. Personally, I’d give up the fight. I’d run on a platform of prohibiting all marriages. Marriage for no one! The law would be retroactive, so poof! no one is married anymore.

Without a legal recognition of marriage, churches would be free to marry whomever they wish. My platform has the added benefit of also being egalitarian towards those—like me—who aren’t married. Fairness and equality for everyone! That’s my mantra.

Cap and Trade…For Kids

In the United States, the institution of a cap-and-trade plan for controlling energy emissions has essentially been a failure. But in my best estimation, our political leaders are missing one key fact: we wouldn’t even have to worry about pollution if there weren’t so damn many people. Hence, I advocate a cap and trade system…for kids. That’s right, children, the result of sexual reproduction in human beings. The average American’s carbon footprint is 20 tons of CO₂ per year—double the global average and 43% more than the average Canadian’s.

Under my plan, each person would have a credit for one child; thus, every couple could have up to two kids. If you don’t want any kids, you can feel free to sell your credit to someone who does. What’s a potential child worth? A thousand dollars? Ten thousand? A million? That’s a question that can and should only be answered by the free market.

With such a solid platform, how could I possibly lose? Oh, that’s right—I’m not thirty-five yet.