Category: 2012-13 Common Read: Ready Player One

In his book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter (Riverhead, 2005), Steven Johnson quotes the advice of the 1998 edition of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care on video games: “The best that can be said of them is that they may help promote eye-hand coordination in children.  The worst that can be said is that they sanction, and even promote, aggression and violent responses to conflict.  But what can be said with much greater certainty is this: most computer games are a colossal waste of time” (17).

Johnson proceeds to defend video games against this charge.  It’s part of a broader defense of contemporary nonliterary popular culture, including television and film.  Johnson’s claim? first, that such culture “has been steadily growing more challenging over the past thirty years”; and, second, that, increasingly, that culture “is honing different mental skills that are just as important as the ones exercised by reading books” (23).

The argument on behalf of video games focuses on two cognitive activities that Johnson believes are at the heart of today’s video game playing.  The first is “probing”: the seemingly endless exploration that game players engage in when trying to learn a game.  Whereas games like poker, baseball, and chess have clear rules that exist prior to and independent of any particular experience of the game, in video games one literally learns the rules by playing the game: “by trial and error, by stumbling across things, by following hunches” (43).  James Paul Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, has broken this process down into four steps, which he calls the “probe, hypothesis, reprobe, rethink” cycle (qtd. 45) and which, as Johnson notes, sounds a lot like the scientific method.

But there’s another “mode of intellectual labor” that Johnson finds in video games and which he calls “telescoping”: the simultaneous management of multiple objectives, including both immediate problem-solving tasks and long-distance goal-seeking, a nested, hierarchical thinking that is surprisingly complex and manifestly effortful.  For example, Johnson’s map of the objectives in the Zelda game The Wind Walker looks like this: “1. Your ultimate goal is to rescue your sister. 2. To do this, you must defeat the villain Ganon. 3. To do this, you need to obtain legendary weapons. 4. To locate the weapons, you need the pearl of Din. 5. To get the pearl of Din, you need to cross the ocean. 6. To cross the ocean, you need to find a sailboat” (50).  And so on.  The actual map for this activity would need to be much, much more complex.  For example, to get the pearl of Din, you have to help the islanders solve their problem: “To do this, you need to cheer up the Prince. To do this, you need to get a letter from the girl. To do this, you need to find the girl in the village. With the letter to the Prince, you must now befriend the Prince. To do this, you need to get to the top of Dragon Roost Mt. To do this, you must get to the other side of the gorge. To do this, you must fill up the gorge with water so you can swim across. To do this, you must use a bomb to blow up the rock blocking the water” (52).  And so on.  Note that every one of these steps itself takes significant amounts of probing, each individual task embedded in a hierarchy of numerous other tasks, all nested within the main goal of the game itself: in the case of Zelda, to rescue your sister.  Johnson admits that the actual content of this particular game – cheering up the Prince, etc. – doesn’t sound very sophisticated when reduced to a written script.  But the playing of the game, the hours and hours spent probing and telescoping, is quite sophisticated: “it’s about finding order and meaning in the world, and making decisions that help create that order” (62).

What do you think of this defense of video games?  How does Johnson’s description of game playing fit what Wade does in Ready Player One?  What does Johnson leave out?  What counter-arguments might be used to deflate this defense?

On June 5, the release date of the Ready Player One trade paperback, author Ernest Cline announced that he had hidden an “Easter egg” in the book itself (both hardcover and paperback versions)!  If readers can find the clue, it will lead them to the first of three increasingly difficult video game challenges.  The first person to complete all three challenges will win a grand prize.  Click here for the announcement, which includes a link to the contest rules.

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?

One of my favorite chapters in Ready Player One is 0001.  It’s not the first chapter in the book – that’s 0000 – but it is the chapter that most vividly sets the scene.  It’s also the chapter that made me want to read this book.  Chapter 0000 gets our attention, of course: it announces the $240 billion prize waiting for whoever finds the Easter egg that James Halliday has hidden in his videogame OASIS.  But it’s the next chapter, 0001, that really introduces us to the book’s hero, eighteen-year-old Wade Watts, and gives us our first peek into his bleak but fascinating world.

It’s not a pretty place.  In the year 2045, “the polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and the weather is all messed up.  Plants and animals are dying off in record numbers, and lots of people are starving and homeless.  And we’re still fighting wars with each other, mostly over the few resources we have left” (17).  Wade lives with fourteen other refugees in a trailer perched on top of a stack of twenty-one other trailers, in a hive of over five hundred stacks of trailers just west of Oklahama City.  Such stacks, according to Wade, were “scattered around the outskirts of most major cities, each one overflowing with uprooted rednecks like my parents, who – desperate for work, food, electricity, and reliable OASIS access – had fled their dying small towns and had used the last of their gasoline (or their beasts of burden) to haul their families, RVs, and trailer homes to the nearest metropolis” (21).

Wade’s parents are now gone.  His father was “shot dead while looting a grocery store” (15) when Wade was just a few months old.  And his mother died of a drug overdose when he was eleven.  But Wade’s condition is not unique in 2045, “a pretty crappy time in history” (18).  Fortunately, Wade has two things going for him: a hideout in a nearby junkyard, where he has found “something of immeasurable value: privacy” (25), and OASIS: the massively multiplayer online game that is now the virtual reality for most of humanity.  Given the “world of chaos, pain, and poverty” (18) into which Wade is born, it’s easy to see the attraction of living one’s life on screen, especially when there’s an online adventure like Halliday’s Easter egg hunt.

All this is brilliantly depicted by Ernest Cline in chapter 0001.  It’s a grim introduction to the book, but it captures well the post-apocalyptic tone of much contemporary fiction.  The genre is often referred to as “dystopian” fiction, from the Greek neologism dystopia: an imaginary place “of total misery and wretchedness” (American Heritage Dictionary).  The genre goes back more than a century and includes such classics as H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s 1984.  More recent examples include Margaret Atwood’s The Haidmaid’s Tale, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story.  The genre’s popularity, in fact, has been soaring lately, especially with younger readers (note the craze surrounding Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy).  The website goodreads has a nifty timeline showing the recent rise of dystopian fiction.  You can also read discussions about the phenomenon in issues of Education Week, the New York Times, and Britain’s Telegraph, which notes the special appeal the genre seems to have for female readers.

What do you make of all this dystopia?  What’s causing the “craze” for such fiction among young adults these days?  And how does Ready Player One fit, or not fit, into that craze?

This year, as part of the Common Read, NSO is sponsoring a voluntary Essay Contest, open to all incoming first-year students.  Here is the Fall 2012 Common Read Essay Prompt:

At the heart of Ready Player One is a treasure hunt, full of puzzles to solve, villains to vanquish, and opponents to out-score.  And yet unlike a lot of “fantasy” fiction, the book often feels quite realistic, as if it were set in our world, only a few decades into the future.  Write an essay in which you connect the book to issues or problems relevant to you today.  Use examples from the book to support your analysis.

The contest rules are as follows:

1. All fall 2012 incoming first-year students at UMass Amherst are eligible to enter.
2. Essays should be between 2-4 pages long, or about 500-1,000 words, typed, double-spaced, with 1-inch margins and 12-point type.
3. Quotations from Ready Player One should be appropriately marked and cited, with page numbers in parentheses.
4. The first page of the essay should include your name, campus address, phone number, UMass email address, and title.
5. Essays should be submitted electronically as an email attachment (either PDF or Word) to commonread@acad.umass.edu.
6. Essays must be received no later than Monday, August 20, 2012, 5:00 pm EST.

Winners will be announced at New Students Convocation on August 31.  First-, Second-, and Third-Place winners will receive gift cards from the University Store and have a chance to meet author Ernest Cline.

Questions about the contest should be directed to Prof. David Fleming, English Department, UMass Amherst, at dfleming@english.umass.edu; or call NSO at 413-545-2621.

No Impact Man is UMass Amherst’s third “Common Read,” to be distributed this summer to all 2013-14 new students (both first-year and transfer).  The program started in 2011 when Ron Suskind’s A Hope in the Unseen was selected as a common reading assignment for all incoming freshmen.  Students received a copy of the book during summer New Students Orientation and were asked to read it before returning to campus in the fall.  At New Students Convocation on September 2, 2011, the book’s protagonist, Cedric Jennings, gave the keynote address, and there were discussion sessions later that day, in addition to other programming in the fall.  The 2012 version of the project, using Ernie Cline’s Ready Player One and also featuring an author visit, built on the successes of 2011.

The Common Read at UMass Amherst was started by Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and Campus Life Jean Kim, in the hopes that a shared reading assignment for all incoming first-year students would not only help prepare them for the vibrant intellectual life of this university but also provide them with a valuable community-building experience and give them a welcome opportunity to reflect, both individually and in groups, on their transition from high school to college.  The idea of a common book at UMass was not new (for years Commonwealth College had an annual “Dean’s Book”), but a shared reading assignment for the entire freshman class – and, by extension, the whole campus – was new.

Of course, many colleges and universities have such programs.  In 2011, new students at Mount Holyoke College read Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.  At Amherst College, incoming freshmen read excerpts from Race and Class Matters at an Elite College by Elizabeth Aries.  At Smith College, it was The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  And at Hampshire College, students read Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (new Hampshire freshmen in fall 2012 will read Jeff Sharlet’s Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between).

Summer reading assignments are common at large universities, too.  At the University of Connecticut, new students last year read Half the Sky, the same book read at Mount Holyoke; while at Tufts, new students read Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun.  There are also long-standing summer reading programs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (its 2012 book is The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr); Appalachian State University (2012 book: Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter); the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2012 book: Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss); and Washington State University (2012 book: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks).  (For recent trends in common reading programs, see this New York Times article; for lists of institutions and books, see data collected by the National Resource Center for the First Year Experience and Barbara Fister at Gustavus Adolphus College.)

The rise of common reading programs on college campuses can be traced to two historical phenomena from the past quarter century: the rise of “mass reading events” in society at large and the emergence of “first year experience” programs on U.S. college campuses.

Book clubs have been around for decades, of course; “mass reading events,” on the other hand, are a more recent phenomenon, the book club expanded to very large groups, often with the help of electronic media, such as television, radio, and the internet.  The most famous mass reading project in history is probably Oprah’s Book Club, a monthly event showcased for several years on the Oprah Winfrey television talk show.  The club’s first selection, in 1996, was The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard; for the next six years, with enormous publicity, significant effects on the publishing industry, and occasional controversy, the club flourished, until dying out around 2002 – though later versions popped up sporadically until the end of Oprah’s show in 2011.  (A good resource on Oprah’s Book Club is Kathleen Rooney’s Reading With Oprah, published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2008.)

It may have been the success of Oprah’s club that spawned other mass reading programs in this country, most notably “One City, One Book” projects, in which entire cities are encouraged to read the same text.  The idea is said to have begun with “If All of Seattle Read the Same Book” in 1998, organized by Nancy Pearl of Seattle Public Library’s Washington Center for the Book.  The book chosen was The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks.  The idea spread rapidly, and by the mid-2000s, hundreds of community reading programs were operating around the country.  Perhaps the best known today is “One Book, One Chicago,” which began in 2001 with Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (Chicago’s 2012 selection is The Book Thief by Markus Zusak).

In our area, Northampton’s “On the Same Page” project selected Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried in 2011.  The same book was the 2010 selection of “One Book Holyoke.”  The “Pittsfield Reads” program, meanwhile, selected Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in 2011.  And the “South Hadley Reads” selection in 2011 was Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.  Many cities have begun such programs (see the Library of Congress’ list here); it’s been more difficult to keep them going year after year.  The National Endowment for the Arts’ “Big Read” project provides grants to support reading programs in 75 communities nationwide, including Boston (which this year is reading Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies) and Deerfield (which chose Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club ).  There are “One City, One Book” projects outside the United States, too: Dublin’s 2012 book was Dubliners by James Joyce.  For research on “mass reading events,” see Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo’s “Beyond the Book” project.  (In 2012-13, an international Common Read took place, involving Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.)

But when did colleges and universities start asking their students to read the same book, especially first-year students in the summer before they arrive on campus?  For that we need to look at another historical phenomenon: the rise of “First Year Experience” programs in this country.  Orientations and other programming events for freshmen go back centuries; but the current wave of “First Year Experience” programs can be traced to a seminar taught at the University of South Carolina in 1972.  Called “University 101,” it was an effort to improve retention on that campus and to help reconnect disaffected students to their university after the protests of the late 1960s.  The course was a success and widely copied.  In 1982, the director of University 101, John Gardner, held a national meeting in Columbia on “the freshman seminar”; 175 people came.  The next year, the First Annual Conference on the Freshman Year Experience was held; and in 1987, the National Resource Center for the First Year Experience was founded.  Its 2008 conference drew more than 1,600 attendees from around the world.

The movement has been influential: between 1987 and 1995, the proportion of colleges and universities which reported that they were “taking steps to improve the first year” for their students rose from 37 to 82%, and it is thought that the figure is even higher today (click here for more on this history).  First Year Experience programs include University 101-type courses, freshman seminars, residence halls for first-year students only, residential learning communities, undergraduate research programs, enhanced academic advising for freshmen, service learning projects, interdisciplinary and intercultural learning experiences, and extensive new student orientations (like UMass’ own NSO).

When you combine the mass reading event in the wider culture with first year experience programs on college campuses, you get “One Campus, One Book” projects like ours.  The projects vary by campus, but their objectives overlap considerably.  The goals of the UMass “Common Read,” for example, are threefold: to introduce incoming students to the intellectual life of this university; to provide a shared experience for students arriving on a campus that can sometimes feel intimidating and fragmented; and to give new freshmen a chance to reflect, both individually and in groups, on the often fraught transition from high school to college, from home to UMass.  Interestingly, Andi Twiton’s study of more than a hundred “common read” programs found two goals predominating: to model intellectual engagement and to build a sense of community, with more than 80% of respondents naming those two goals as key.  But there are other potential effects of these projects.  One of the things I like about Common Read projects is all the secondary readers – beyond the intended audience – they reach.  After all, more than just first-year students read these books; their parents do as well, along with interested faculty and staff, peer counselors and resident advisors, even curious community members.  During the last two years, while talking about the Common Read with groups around campus, I met so many people committed to our students and interested in the Common Read.  All of them had copies of either Ready Player One or A Hope in the Unseen in front of them, many of them heavily marked and dog-eared.

But designing and conducting such a project, on a campus like ours, is tough.  It’s one thing to ask a few hundred new students at a small liberal arts college to read the same book before arriving in the fall.  It’s another thing to do it with nearly 5,000 new freshmen, from wildly diverse backgrounds, coming to such a large university, divided into multiple colleges and professional schools, whose faculty are often motivated more by advanced research than by undergraduate learning.  How do you select such a book?  You need something that will garner wide appeal across campus, a book attractive to both 18 year olds and the many adults around them, a book that will resonate with readers’ hearts and souls but also connect to the intellectual life of a university.  It has to be a book new students will read, without the motivation of a grade, in the summer between high school and college; it should be available in a paperback version, not too long or too short; and it’s nice to have an author who can come visit at the start of the school year to talk with students.  Finally, you’ve got to give the program a high profile, surrounding it with enthusiasm, while not raising unrealistic expectations for what is, after all, a reading assignment for nearly 5,000 young adults!

It’s not surprising, then, that common reading projects have generated controversy.  In 2002, New York City tried to emulate “One City, One Chicago” with its own common read, but the project ended in division and acrimony when organizers couldn’t decide between Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker and James McBride’s The Color of Water.   That same year, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was sued by angry parents when entering freshmen were asked to read Approaching the Qur’an by Michael Sells (the University won the lawsuit, but the experience was searing; see this page, with resources about the controversy from Prof. Carl Ernst of UNC-CH).  More recently, the conservative National Association of Scholars has complained that colleges too often choose books with a liberal bias (for other critiques, see this article from Inside Higher Ed).

So, the projects have potential drawbacks.  It’s probably not helpful, then, to exaggerate their virtues or overstate their effects.  I learned the first year, with A Hope in the Unseen, that nearly everyone on campus had an opinion about the book we chose, many before they’d even read it!  And some people told us flatly, “the students won’t read it.”  On that count, of course, they were wrong.  But I was glad that we were generating cross-campus dialogue, even if some of it was skeptical – connecting people was one of the goals of the project, after all!  Still, it’s probably good to deal with some misconceptions off the bat.  For one thing, the book isn’t meant to make some simple, univocal statement about what “the University” believes or values.  And organizers of the Common Read don’t imagine that every student will read the book the same way and come out with the same lessons.  English professors will be the first to tell you that when you reduce a book to a single, unambiguous message, you reduce both reading and readers in the process.  Similarly, the Common Read isn’t meant to solve, for once and all, some problem on campus, like racism or ethnocentrism.  As Andi Twiton shows in the study cited above, at most schools, common reading programs are meant to do two rather mundane, though important, things: to help build community among the entering class and to model for new students the kinds of intellectual engagement – namely, reading, writing, thinking, and talking about texts – that colleges and universities pride themselves on.  In other words, the Common Read is about the experience, not the message; and it’s about the readers, not the book (although selecting a good book is definitely important!).

Two more things: success doesn’t hinge on 100% participation – though we certainly want every new student to read as much of the book as he or she can.  And the book doesn’t have to be the main focus of campus life for the rest of the year – though it’s important to have programming that not only encourages students to read but gives them a chance afterwards to talk about their reading, ideally in multiple fora.  (See this report from the AACU with ideas on how to improve Common Read projects.)

The UMass Common Read is now three years old and still evolving.  Some things continue from the first year: the book is still distributed during summer New Students Orientation; it is still tied to the keynote address at New Students Convocation; it is still the subject of discussion groups later that day; and it is featured in this blog, which is meant to be a space for students, faculty, and staff to talk about the book.  But changes were made for the second and third years: the selection committee was larger and more diverse, including faculty from nearly every college on campus, along with student readers; the Common Read was tied in its second year to the Deans’ Theme (which was focused in 2012-13 on “social media”); and that year we also initiated an essay contest.

I hope this brief history of mass reading projects on U.S. college campuses, and the Common Read at UMass Amherst in particular, has been helpful.  If you have any comments or questions about this post, please reply below!  It would be great to get a discussion going among campus facilitators of the Common Read.  As summer arrives, the posts will be written more and more with incoming students in mind.  If you have an idea for one of those posts, or would be willing to write one yourself, please let me know.  And feel free throughout the spring and summer to reply to this blog.  (You can learn more about me by clicking on “About this Blog” at the top of the page.)

Happy reading!

Ready Player One has won a 2012 Alex Award, given by the Young Adult Library Services Association to books written for adults that are liked by young adults too! This confirms for us one of the reasons we chose the book as the 2012-13 Common Read at UMass: we thought it would appeal not only to incoming first-year students but also to faculty, staff, parents, and community members.

Hello Students!  We are excited to welcome you into the UMass Amherst community, and we are even more excited to join with you in this year’s Common Read: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. This blog will serve as one of the many spaces for conversation about the book. Other opportunities to talk about Ready Player One will include the Common Read discussions held during Fall NSO, as well as ongoing discussions about the book via facebook (visit this page) or twitter (use #ReadyUMass, #ReadyPlayerOne, #UMass2016)!

When, where, and how do I get my book? Do I have to pay for it?

You will receive a copy of Ready Player One when you come for your Summer NSO session. Books will be distributed when you check out and are FREE for all new students!

Are there any other resources I can check out prior to coming to UMass?

YES! Be sure to check out the links to the right for more resources about the book, as well as helpful offices on campus for first-year students!

I really enjoy using a blog as a way to connect with other students, faculty, and staff on campus; how can I create one for myself?

As a student at the university, you have access to your own blog and you can log into that using your net id and password at websites.umass.edu!

Please note that many of the previous posts archived here concern last year’s Common Read, A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind. Feel free to browse through those posts and comments to see what readers gleaned from that book and what the discussions were like.

For other resources, please see the links on the right of the blog!

Following this post, we will begin our discussion on this year’s Common Read, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. The blog will serve as a medium for students, faculty, and staff to engage in discussions as they read the book; so feel free to comment and share your thoughts!