Conrad Dougherty

Mr. Pace

Dual Credit English IV

15 May 2019

Authenticity vs. Fantasy

Ernest Cline based his book Ready Player One off of a futuristic Earth. Humans

are still the dominant race and continue to find ways to escape the reality of life as we

know it. The most prolific way of doing this is via the massively popular OASIS game, a

real time virtual reality online game where people choose an avatar to play as. So many

people became enthralled with this game that it became, for many, “an escape hatch

into a better reality [...] Because the real world sucked”(18). This use of the OASIS to

dodge the real world left reality as an unfortunate necessity and the OASIS as a way life

which in turn left people without ways to develop, less happiness, and a destroyed

Earth.

Many of the characters in Ready Player One are static characters who never

develop or change throughout the entire book. All of these characters have the OASIS

foremost on their minds and are constantly logged in. They cannot have new

experiences, only repeat what they have done before, and above all, they cannot leave

their comfort zones. Without the ability to have new experiences, the mind is stuck in a

mode where it cannot develop. Mistakes cannot be made, contact cannot be had face to

face, and things began to lose meaning when the same thing is going on each day

everyday.
 Going hand in hand with the OASIS causing people to remain as static

characters is the reduced happiness found in such users. The main character, Wade

Watts spends nearly all of his waking moments logged into the OASIS and alone in his

life. He continually deals with depression, and uses the OASIS as every other person

does, to escape those feelings. Cline writes at the end; “It occured to me then that for

the first time in as long as I could remember, I had absolutely no desire to log back into

the OASIS”(372). He never gets until the end that happiness is a balance, and it has to

found, he finds his with his friends and the girl he has a crush on. Thinking you have

happiness by trying to recreate it never works. Hiding from new experiences also will

not allow change, it only allows fixed mindsets. To truly find what makes one happy,

new things have to be done, different experiences have to be experienced.

Happiness and development are not the only fatalities that come with such virtual

reality technology. Earth as a whole also suffers. “So now 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”(18).

Ernest Cline does a good job portraying how the world is, people have learned to stop

caring about what they have in life and continue to obsess over what they want to have

or can create for themselves elsewhere. There is no appreciation for nature, no

appreciation or care for Earth because people don’t spend time with it anymore.

Escaping life with virtual reality creates people who cannot grow/evolve, find true

happiness, and care about the world they physically live it. People who cannot do new

things cannot change and this stagnant personality in turn does not allow people to
explore new things and learn what truly makes them happy or unhappy. Love is not

attainable except for that in the real world and without that, many people cannot reach

their full potential. When people no longer care about where they physically are they

conditions of that place steadily go downhill, and as seen in Cline’s book, Earth is near

the verge of collapse. People should learn to be happy with what they have and find

happiness within themselves, a game, no matter how life like, cannot create these

feelings. It is only a lousy substitute for what one can have.