Ready Player One is an enjoyable hero’s journey focusing on how the virtual world has power over the real world. The movie shows how VR is accessible to everyone and how a specific game called the Oasis has become everyone’s obsession. The way the people talk about the game reminds me of how my friends would hype GTA. Saying how you can do anything in the game and its a lot of fun. So at first look Oasis looks like a VR version of GTA where the player can jump in and do anything. The is the most played and highest grossing game in the world so the battle between corporation that wants to monetize the game by putting in ads and cash walls etc and they fight against gamers who just want to play the game without corporate interference. That sums up the movie. But the movie links a lot to our current reality and the trajectory that we are heading in. A few of those things are:-
Corporations that work for money over creativity.
In the movie when the creative director James Halliday was working on the game, he wanted to make it a lot more fun for his players. In the development he also had Sorrento the main bad guy of the movie who constantly gave ideas how to monetize the game. Halliday was against adding any monetizing methods into the game. This aspect of the movie reminded me of the old school Blizzard entertainment vs the fairly recent Blizzard entertainment. The only school Blizzard entertainment quite a few amazing games in its time like Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo 1 etc. Back then as a consumer you would get a lot more content at a less price. Nowadays it feels as the players pay more and get less as they have to buy the game and have to pay a lot to make in-game purchases to unlock the remaining content. Nowadays it feels like companies rely on big IP and keep churning it out to stay safe and capitalise on it. The biggest example on this is FIFA.
The Escape.
The movie shows how most people live in “Stacks” and their living conditions don't look good. So it shows how reality sucks and how people desperately crave to escape their cruel reality. So anyone and everyone just jump into the game Oasis. As an added bonus anyone that is able to recover Halliday's 3 keys becomes the owner of this trillion dollar company. This works as a nice hook. In reality we enjoy escapism as well and the two best medium for that is TV or Computer games. By TV I mean movies, series, reality shows, all that jazz. In 2020 when people were asked to quarantine for our safety from COVID, us humans that are very social creatures were disconnected from each other physically. It drove a lot of people up the wall being disconnected and escapism was a way to keep ourselves sane. It was at this time that the video game became a salvation to a lot of people. Even the game Among us that was released in 2018 became one of the biggest game in 2020. Among us is a simple multiplayer game that requires the player to do simple tasks while keeping an eye for the killer among their group. A casual game that people can pick up and a lot of people did. Drawing parallels from the movie in 2020 people needed to escape and so the increase use of VR. In 2020 Half Life Alex a highly anticipated game was released as well.
As a whole
I think it would be amazing if this is our soon to be future. Finally the league of gamer rise. On a serious note I feel that the reality in this movie is a strong possibility of our future where VR is going to be accessible to everyone and the applications of VR extend beyond just games. But I also feel that VR is going to be a stop gap for the following thing we might try to conquer would be hologram by trying to merge both VR and XR together I guess. As an innovative species I feel like by the end of this century we will definitely get there if not before and I for one can’t wait to explore these new possibilities.