I’ve read Wikipedia summaries with more feeling than the beginning of this book. Wade relates all this in a bevy of early chapters that jump ahead three years, smoothing out key emotional moments and massive changes to the book’s universe into an unemotional narrative blur-ironic, considering that the whole point of the ONI is that it allows people to feel like never before. Pop culture aficionado that he is, Wade ponders how easily the ONI could be used for evil-and then decides to release it to his fellow OASIS users anyway, justifying it with the reasoning that he could never withhold wholly immersive escapism from the miserable masses.
Turns out that in addition to winning James Halliday’s fortune, Wade inherited one more thing: the OASIS Neural Interface, or ONI, which allows users to experience every touch, taste, and smell of their digital world. This time around, Wade is rich beyond his wildest dreams but basically a friendless recluse, and now the OASIS can give you a full-senses experience but can also potentially kill you. But neither of these is reason enough to warrant a sequel, especially one that effectively tries to play through the same plot of a posthumous quest with double the pop culture name-dropping and world-ending stakes. The book also made some incisive commentary on retreating into digital worlds instead of trying to fix the climate change-ravaged Earth. Ready Player One, Cline’s 2011 debut novel, delighted readers with its futuristic generation of gunters who had taken on all things 1980s with religious fervor in search of the Easter egg that would bequeath the OASIS, Willy Wonka-style, to one lucky player.
Reading Ready Player Two feels a lot like that.
Because of an extra life, he is given the option of playing through the game again, even though there are no surprises, simply to rack up extra points and because he can. But after winning this particular game, Parzival (Wade’s OASIS alter ego) finds that he automatically starts over. It doesn’t take long for Ernest Cline’s Ready Player Two to reunite gunter-turned-billionaire Wade Owen Watts with a vintage video game that holds a clue to a virtual scavenger hunt that will forever change the future of the digital, escapist OASIS.
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