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Leslie Andrade

Ms. McKay

February 22, 2022

Ready Player One

Power of Reality

Steven Spielbergs’s Ready Player One, released in 2018, is set in 2045 after the planet

suffers multiple catastrophes, and is on the brink of collapse. The only solace people find is the

OASIS, a virtual reality universe created by James Halliday, where you can be or do anything

your heart desires. When Halliday dies, he announces a challenge to find a digital easter egg that

rewards all the rights to the OASIS to whoever finds the egg. A young man, Wade Watts, and his

friends band together to find the egg in a race against a power hungry company called IOI, who

want to capitalize on the free game. By showing the power dynamics in the OASIS, and

illustrating the consequences of power in reality and virtual reality, Steven Spielberg desires to

showcase how power can be dangerous in the wrong hands, and to actively fight against people

who use power for personal gain.

The power dynamics are shown by the ingame conflict between IOI and the gunters, “egg

hunters,” like Wade. In the game, the company IOI, or Innovative Online Industries, is an entire

organization dedicated to finding the easter egg. They “employ” marginalized and people down

on their luck, promising aid if they work for them as disposable virtual soldiers and workers to

try to beat the challenges in the game. They trap these people in a cycle of debt, and control

people's access to the game, as they developed many technological products for OASIS. IOI

represents how people in power can use their influence negatively for their own personal gain,

and detriment to others. They hold a lot of power over other people, and they use that power to
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further their own goals, rather than help the people. They are a metaphor for greed, as they try to

win the game in order to put adverts in the game to gain a profit. In doing so, they are an active

force against the “gunters,” and people like Wade Watts, who are just trying to enjoy the game,

and fight against the IOI soldiers - who they call “sixers” because they go by an individualistic

six-digit-long name. Additionally, while they all gain power in the game the same way, through

coins and artifacts, because IOI is a company, with a division of neverending soldiers, and a

team of people whose sole purpose is to figure out clues and how to complete challenges, they

have more resources to search and find the easter egg than regular people. This causes them to

gain a sort of monopoly in the game, giving them a lot of power in the virtual world as well.

However, in response, the “gunters” represent the free will of the individual, and how people

with little power can still make a difference and succeed in the face of adversaries by thinking

more creatively and being genuinely passionate about their cause. This is shown by how they,

and the rest of the people in OASIS, prevail against the corrupt power. Specifically Speilberg

wanted Wade Watts and his friends, who even though were only five of them, to be the

personification of the fight against corrupt power, and helped band together the OASIS

community to fight against corruption.

Steven Spielberg shows the consequences of power in both virtual reality and reality by

showing how IOI takes advantage of people, and wipes out any competition in the game. In the

movie, IOI had what they called “loyalty centers” where they would bring people they had

“recruited”and forced them to do labor, either as soldiers for actively solving the puzzles for the

keys to the easter egg, or as workers in the game to help build IOI’s monopoly on in-game

resources and events. Many people suffered greatly in the loyalty centers, and IOI’s control

caused many people who searched for the egg to have a rough time. Because of the power that
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IOI held, they were able to manipulate the people in real life, generating major animosity from

family members, but as long as the rest of the community could get their products for the game,

they didn’t care. The only ones that did were the people who resisted, like Artemis. Not only

that, as I said, many people relied on IOI in order to get the equipment to actually play the game,

thereby contributing to their resources they used to try to control the game. This unbalanced

power in the favor of IOI caused a dependence on a hated organization, thereby keeping it

instituted even with opposition. Spielberg made this a point to show how even though people

with power can abuse others, when a community joins together with a common goal, they can

make a huge difference, in which case the OASIS community risking their virtual lives to help

Wade finish the last challenge and get to the egg.

Throughout the movie, Steven Spielberg encourages and inspires people to fight together

against injustice. Even with great risk, and even if someone is young, they can still make a

difference. People with power can do horrible things. He shows this through the power dynamics

in the game, and the consequences of that power in virtual reality and reality itself. If a

community comes together, justice can prevail. In the end, fighting against corruption does not

have to be a single player game.

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Citations

Ready Player One. Directed by Steven Spielberg, performances by Tye Sheridan and Olivia

Cooke, Warner Brothers, 2018