More than Oklahoma City or Columbus, Ohio, the “real” setting of Ready Player One is the Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation – the OASIS – a massively multiplayer online role-playing game designed by James Halliday and run by his company Gregarious Simulation Systems. In the year 2045, according to narrator Wade Watts, the OASIS is the “globally networked virtual reality most of humanity now used on a daily basis” (1).
If the offscreen world that Wade describes in the book, a true dystopia, seems far into the future (although not that far!), the “open-source reality” of the OASIS seems at times eerily contemporary. Many people today are just like eighteen-year-old Wade, who sees his computer screen as ”an escape hatch into a better reality” (18):
You could log in and instantly escape the drudgery of your day-to-day life. You could create an entirely new persona for yourself, with complete control over how you looked and sounded to others. In the OASIS, the fat could become thin, the ugly could become beautiful, and the shy, extroverted. Or vice versa. You could change your name, age, sex, race, height, weight, voice, hair color, and bone structure. Or you could cease being human altogether, and become an elf, ogre, alien, or any other creature from literature, movies, or mythology.
In the OASIS, you could become whomever and whatever you wanted to be, without ever revealing your true identity, because your anonymity was guaranteed. (57)
Given the state of the off-screen world depicted in Ready Player One, readers will readily see the attraction of the OASIS for Wade. But in our pre-apocalyptic “actual” world, spending enormous amounts of time and energy in virtual reality is almost as popular and consuming as it is for the characters in this novel. Why?
Last week, we looked at Steven Johnson’s defense of video game playing as a cognitively challenging kind of problem-solving with enormous benefits for players. According to Johnson, the combination of intense exploration (“probing”) and long-term goal-seeking (“telescoping”) required by today’s video games can give devoted players practice in just the sort of sophisticated intellectual skills that contemporary society needs and rewards.
But isn’t it possible that these games are also addictive and that they are turning us away from the world and our fellow human beings in ways that are harmful to us both individually and collectively?
Perhaps the most eloquent statement of this argument is Sherry Turkle’s recent Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic Books, 2011). After interviewing dozens of avid online game players, who devote as much time and energy to their online avatars as to their “actual” lives, Turkle became alarmed. The more opportunities we have for electronic connection, she argues, the more alone we seem to feel; the greater freedom to create new identities for ourselves in virtual reality, the more insecure we become:
We enjoy continual connection but rarely have each other’s full attention. We can have instant audiences but flatten out what we say to each other in reductive genres of abbreviation. We like it that the Web ‘knows’ us, but this is only possible because we compromise our privacy, leaving electronic bread crumbs that can be easily exploited, both politically and commercially. We have many new encounters but may come to experience them as tentative, to be put ‘on hold’ if better ones come along . . . We can work from home, but our work bleeds into our private lives until we can barely discern the boundaries between them. We like being able to reach each other almost instantaneously but have to hide our phones to force ourselves to take a quiet moment. (280)
Turkle describes families whose members are “alone together, each in their own rooms, each on a networked computer or mobile device. We go online because we are busy but end up spending more time with technology and less with each other. We defend connectivity as a way to be close, even as we effectively hide from each other” (281).
The author of Ready Player One is clearly aware of both the attractions and dangers of virtual reality. Wade’s life would be unbearable without the OASIS; yet he also yearns for “real” connection with “real” others. And what about us? Are we sacrificing too much for the sake of being “wired”?
As I read this novel, I am noticing a theme of isolation vs. collaboration; of how alone they are but also how badly they all need each other. I personally find it sad how they chose to escape reality instead of facing it together and collectively coming up with solutions to improve their world. It’s as if they have given up on the real world and their real selves and have resorted to make-believe lives because that is the only way they have any control. Reality limits them, but the OASIS gives them infinite options. People are happier when they have perceived control over their lives, and that is what virtual reality offers.