GUEST ESSAY: Halliday's Golden Ticket in "Ready Player One"

Halliday's Golden Ticket in Ready Player One

By Janelle Dixon

Ready Player One depicts a world where people constantly escape their reality. Every person is no longer living in reality. Instead their distraction from reality, the virtual, has become their reality. Urban decay is brought to a new level with lower class living in trailer towers known as “The Stacks” and streets are shown neglected as well as trash and garbage piling and forgotten.

The Stacks

People are shown first in the real world not interacting with others or the world around them, playing the Oasis. The physical realm is only utilized to stay alive, necessities, food, sleep and restroom. The virtual has become the dominate reality where people spend all their time, where they socialize, work, express themselves. Even as far as body suits to feel physical sensations to better experience the virtual. Therefore all attention to the physical realm is forgotten, it may be assumed that the physical world would become purely functional and efficient but instead as shown in “The Stacks” no attention is shown towards organization or pedestrian considerations no new development is shown, as that’s not what’s important in this world. Instead all exploration of life and self is done in the “Oasis” which we may see as a game, but they present as important as life. The movie describes it as people’s livelihoods and where all time is invested, where if you die in Oasis its like your starting all over again, they show someone attempting suicide after dying in the Oasis.

 People are still shown in offices working or children in school but little of the built environment is new or different from today. Even in depictions of these spaces we are seeing people interacting with the oasis in some way. I see this as them expressing that development in the physical is no longer accelerating but moving at a constant. Instead the virtual is a boundless world of growth where all new development is focused. It’s not clear from the movie but its interesting to consider resource use in this world. Where their physical world may have depleted resources so to distract from that they utilize a world with unlimited resources. I think “The Stacks” is a strong representation of how the author has chosen to depict the world. In today’s world we are discovering more above efficient prefabrication but instead of this being utilized or developed, trailer homes are stacked on a minimal steel frame. Almost a vernacular solution but not a cost or time effective solution. Watching Wade move through the Stacks in the opening scenes gives us an idea of the circulation, vertical movement is done through a mesh of fire escape stairs and ladders  even descending rope jumping across peoples living spaces. Which makes it seem that people don’t often leave their home, there is no reason to. Even packages are carried by drones to people’s homes which enables people to never leave their homes. But observing the circulation its no easy thing to leave your 10th story trailer to take a stroll. 

This dystopia presented in Ready Player One may have moved into a degrowth type world. Where resource extraction has decelerated causing the use of systems that use less resources (Shaw). Since focus has been moved to the virtual and development of the physical has decelerated, physical resources are being utilized less. People travel less, and the built environment growth is limited. This could explain the adaptation and reuse of trailer homes in the stacks. An interesting component at play is that the concept of degrowth is considered site specific, by using the resources on site. In the real world their resources on site are mainly trash. In the Oasis the scale is global since it’s a global platform and all have access to the same resources. The consideration of place and site transforms. As designers of the built environment site should be strongly taken into consideration yet in the Oasis designers are in control of the context. Would this lead to the loss of a sense of place? Presenting a complexity, what responsibility comes with influencing the site, context and building an immersive design.

There are reinforcements of a separation of class represented in the main opposing characters, Wade and Nolan, Orphan and CEO. We can see this in the players ‘gear’ and playing space. Wade plays in a junk yard in an abandoned van which later becomes his home. He barrows playing gear from his aunt his only living family member. While Nolan plays in top tech body suit and gaming sphere, in his CEO office overlooking his armies playing ground. 

Wade’s Van

The scene immediately following the images above Nolan makes Wade an offer for money and status in replace for ‘clanning up’ or his help in finishing the Easter Egg. When Wade denies Nolan attempts to kill Wade by blowing up the tower in the Stacks where his aunt lives. The Term ‘clanning up’ comes up a few times in the movie usually in context that it’s a bad choice, Parzevil playing the lone wolf, the lone questing knight, while Nolan runs the biggest Clan of ‘Gunter’s’ or die hard Egg hunters, the sixers. The Sixers are presented as robotic faceless emotionless players, looking at the oasis as a job. Money in the virtual world is highlighted throughout the movie. People make money in Oasis and spend it there, it’s not a free utopian world, you can die and must start over, and everything costs money just like the real world. If the aspect of money isn’t what’s different and making people want to live their lives, there instead I’d say it’s the freedom of identity. 

In the Oasis each person creates an avatar giving a new consideration to how we present ourselves to others. We no longer are limited in our physical appearance people can change clothes, hair style, sex, and even species. We see this with Parcevil in the beginning when he changes his hair the first time, we see him in the Oasis. Or when his best friend online who is seen as a large strong male cyborg and ends up being a female in the real world. Not only does this make us more strongly consider our appearance and manipulating it but also requires us to reflect into how we want to be seen. The mirror stage in your infancy is when you develop the understanding that you are an object seen by others and start to define yourself by how others see you (Fink). Does the Oasis present a further mirror stage and defining yourself even further by your appearance to others? 

The Oasis plays a unique role as a distraction for the public, the game presents a utopian world for the people in the world of Ready Player One. The decayed urban environment provides no place for human interactions, public amenities and spaces are non-existent in the film. All have been moved to the Oasis, focus on development for human interactions has also been focused in the virtual world. The game is presented as a double-edged sword (Nordstrom). The game promotes social interaction it’s made for personal expression, yet it causes the users to withdraw from the real world into fantasy. This takes the publics focus off the problems surrounding them and offers them an escape. Justin Nordstrom offers that this dystopian world requires this game to be possible, the game is a necessary social and creative escape offered which allows the decay to occur in his “A Pleasant for the World to Hide” article. The titles reflecting that the Oasis is a utopia with-in this dystopia for the people to hide or escape from the grim apocalyptic reality. The idea of this double-edge sword offers that this masquerading utopia is the publics enabler to allow the neglect. Users of the Oasis retreat into the virtual and themselves. This brings into question the effect on people that this retreat into self brings. Perhaps people are liberated and can find more out about themselves through the self-expression the game offers. Some people choose to wage wars on the planet only for war, sometimes for money, others may spend their time on vacation planet. This self-expression is the utopia that’s presented a world where you can be whatever you want and do even as a career whatever you want free of real-world limitations. 

Nolan’s Sphere

Consideration of the built environment in Ready Player One, we are only offered a few settings in the real world of Ready Player One, the school briefly in the beginning, the stacks, the dump that surrounds it, a building which appears to be refuge for homeless which the lead female lives in, the downtown area, the loan collectors building, the 6ers work space and the CEOS office and play sphere. These different places combined paint a picture of the dystopic society. The main difference we see from today’s world is the decay of the city and the further separation of the classes with trailer parks overflowing stacked carelessly on top of one another. The industrial building housing people with no other place to go setting up camp in large empty cold spaces. Even the dump around the stacks Wade himself inhabits and uses as a third space. The company buildings have seemingly no consideration to create good working/living environments probably since everyone’s usually in the virtual even there. Loan collector pods barely five feet by five feet hardly livable where people who are in debt spend their days basically as slaves working to pay off their debt but accruing living expenses we are even presented with the example of the lead females father dying while trying to work off his loans to depict how poor the experience is. Wades family showing how close they are or how easy it is to end up in debt losing battles in the Oasis betting all money in a video game and losing it in moments. 

I argue this isn’t different from today and completely relatable, our society expects us to have our phones on us 24/7. Daily life and ‘office hours’ are less and less 9 to 5. Globalization connects us through work and social life. TV shows used to be once a week you watch and episode of your favorite show. Now with Netflix full seasons are released and binged the day its released hours on end of mindless laziness. Temptations that fill our time and distract us from reality. Providing a platform for self-expression and an escape from reality. New advances allow us to be lazy with more and more delivery services, we already can escape our physical world. Ready Player One shows us a possible world and how our world today could respond like a kid at a candy store, society being the unsupervised child and technology being our candy that we must be told not to eat because we weren’t ready to handle it. The presentation of ourselves on social media is similar to the Oasis avatars, profile were individuals can express themselves even hide their true identity and become whoever they want. The is an epidemic especially in cities of people feeling lonely, is this a sign of our technology separating us from the physical? 

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Endnotes

Speilberg, Steven, director. Ready Player One. Warner Home Video, 2018.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994

Nordstrom, Justin. ““A Pleasant Place for the World to Hide”: Exploring Themes of Utopian Play in Ready Player One.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 18, no. 2 (2016): 238–56. https://doi.org/10.5325/intelitestud.18.2.0238

Shaw, Matt. “What Is the Architecture of Degrowth?” Archpaper.com, October 8, 2019. https://ift.tt/2MHzxGQ.

Fink, Bruce, trans. Jacques Lacan Ecrits. W. W. Norton and Company, 2006.

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