And yet, the choice posed to Wade is fundamentally unchanged: whether to take on the challenges of reality or bury your head in the virtual sand. The "Matrix" of Ready Player One is fun! It's a video game, and an ostensibly optional one. When it all culminates in Wade's "red pill, blue pill" moment, we find The Matrix's famous dichotomy, but twisted in its context. The fun and the thrill of the chase keep the pages moving and gets you past Cline's tiresome name-dropping of every pop culture item of the 1980s. Our heroes get to fly around in X-wings, drive the DeLorean, or turn into giant robots. Like the VR environment of the Matrix, where Keanu can learn kung-fu at the speed of an upload, OASIS is a fun world to play around in. Crime is rampant and people live in towering assemblages of old trailer homes called "the stacks." And so, people spend every possible moment within OASIS, the massively multiplayer online game that has become humanity's escapist reality. The Earth of 2045 is crippled by climate change energy crises and unemployment have wrecked the economy. At least then they wouldn't have to grapple with the ugly truth. Humanity is not literally enslaved in Ready Player One, but its humans might be better off to be blissfully trapped in the Matrix. In both stories, humanity dwells in a fake reality, but for entirely different reasons. While reading through Ernest Cline's 2011 novel, the source material for Steven Spielberg's new blockbuster movie, I thought a lot about The Matrix.
To read it another way: Do you want the red pill, or the blue pill? Reality, or the simulation? "So don't press it unless you're absolutely positive it's the right thing to do, OK?" "It will shut down the OASIS forever," cyber-Halliday tells Parzival. Halliday's avatar hands over not only the prize for winning the contest-billions of dollars and total control of the platform-but also a Big Red Button that would delete the pretend world and destroy its source code. In this moment of triumph, he meets a representation of James Halliday, the tech titan of this world who built the OASIS virtual reality platform where humanity now spends his time.
Press red button game full#
Wilson (aka the avatar Parzival) has thwarted the forces of evil and solved the elaborate VR scavenger hunt full of Atari games and bad 80s references that drives the plot of Ready Player One.
When Ready Player One reached its climactic moment, you might have noticed a familiar choice.
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