Why would you want to think about how potentially toxic empty nostalgia can be? Ultraman’s fighting Mechagodzilla over here! What ensues is an exuberantly paced quest narrative that begs to be devoured like candy and refuses any hard questions or contemplation on the reader’s part. He just has to find the egg before a massive corporation gets its hands on it instead, regulating away the freedom of virtual reality and ending the OASIS as Wade knows it. And our hero Wade, an 18-year-old video game addict from a trailer park, is sure that he’s just the man to do it. To find the egg, hunters (gunters, in the parlance of the book) will need an encyclopedic knowledge of Halliday’s beloved 1980s pop culture. 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’s hidden inside the game. As an escape, most of humanity spends its time plugged into the OASIS, an expansive VR landscape that incorporates most of the 20th and 21st centuries’ pop culture into itself, so that users can pilot the spaceship from Firefly to a Dungeons & Dragons castle. The premise is appealingly silly and insubstantial: It’s 2045, and the dystopian world has become unbearable. When Ready Player One came out, it felt like an escapist fantasy for gamers Warner Brosīack in 2011, it was almost impossible not to think about Ready Player One as harmless fun. 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. Gamergate was a toxic cultural battle filled with harassment so vicious it would become a major influence on the alt-right - but fundamentally, it was about who gets to be a geek, which parts of geek identity are worth lauding, and which parts are destructive. #Gamergate: Here's why everybody in the video game world is fighting And that’s because in 2015, the geek community of the internet was still in the throes of the seismic event known as Gamergate. In 2015, Cline released his second book, Armada, to a reception that looked a lot closer to the consensus on Ready Player One today than the consensus on Ready Player One in 2011. Luckily, there’s a perfect stepping stone that can help us understand exactly how this transition happened. What gives? How did the consensus on a single book go from “exuberant and meaningful fun!” to “everything that is wrong with the internet!” over the span of seven years? It was “ a guaranteed pleasure.” It was “ witty.” It was not only “a simple bit of fun” but also “a rich and plausible picture of future friendships in a world not too distant from our own.” Reading the end of Ready Player One, opined a writer for Tor, “I felt like a kid who thinks eating an entire cake by himself sounded fun - I was sick of it, and craving something of real substance.”Ī time traveler from 2011 could be forgiven for being deeply confused by this response. “Many people find its take on games and so-called genre art to be a dull, pandering tableau of reference points as an end unto themselves,” the A.V. “ Ready Player One is a terrible book and it will be a terrible movie,” the Outline proclaimed. And the internet is ready and waiting to tell him why that’s a terrible idea. Senator Ben Nelson wrote the foreword to the book.Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, an adaptation of the 2011 novel of the same name by Ernest Cline, is about to debut. For many years, there was extensive coverage of the event by the news media. One central figure went to jail and others were dismissed from their jobs. Several governors became embroiled in the controversy, as well as legislators, bureaucrats and the community. The opposition of the community eventually succeeded, and the license to build the dump was denied. During this time, the community was transformed "from a small group of isolated farmers to a defiant band of environmentalists". The residents of the Boyd County farming community resisted the offer and controversy followed for almost two decades. In 1989, two multinational corporations and several government agencies proposed a waste dump and offered payment of $3 million per year for 40 years. Nuclear Nebraska: The Remarkable Story of the Little County That Couldn’t Be Bought is a 2007 book by Susan Cragin which follows the controversy about a proposed low level nuclear waste dump, which was planned for Boyd County, Nebraska.
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