The post below comes from the great folks at the UMass Amherst Center for Teaching and Faculty Development: Mary Deane Sorcinelli, Matt Ouellett, Brian Baldi, Karin Camihort, Mei Shih, and Jung Yun.
In Ready Player One, the five main characters band together to make pivotal choices, use creative strategies, and call upon everything they know to guide their progress in the game. Here on campus, facilitators for the Common Read discussion sessions are on a quest of their own. Recently, UMass Amherst faculty and staff came together over three information sessions to share initial ideas on how to talk about Ready Player One; it quickly became clear that there are some very creative ideas emerging around the book’s themes of quest, virtual reality, and networking. Participants in the information sessions discussed the possibility of:
- Connecting Ready Player One to The Hunger Games, another narrative involving multiplayer games on a grand scale;
- Using theater exercises to get students to use their bodies (and no words!) to present moments in the book that were memorable to them;
- Asking students to think about how virtual reality plays a role in their lives now, and how it might play a role in their upcoming college experience;
- Using the book to explore what constitutes a good story, how we talk about a text, and how a text operates as a common experience;
- Identifying Ready Player One’s theme of social justice and connecting the characters’ resistance to the corporate specter (OASIS) to the Occupy Wall Street protests; and
- How attaining a college degree can be seen as a quest and how students have the opportunity to network with others and change their persona in this new environment.
Those are just a few of the discussion topics faculty and staff are considering as they begin their summer – many more are likely to arise as they continue reading the book.
How about you? What has resonated most for you about Ready Player One? What aspects of these themes would you like to learn more about and discuss?