by Caelan Sujet
After reading Ready Player One, I was nothing short of excited to see how Steven Spielberg would manipulate the story to fit the big screen. Spielberg took Ernest Cline’s book and molded it into a wonderful fantasy full of 70s and 80s pop references. The movie is wonderful. The malleable, virtual reality known as Oasis is dazzling, and the hunt for the Easter eggs left behind by James Holiday is thrilling.
Stepping out of the theater, most of us were dreaming about the avatar we would create if the Oasis existed. Surfing on forty foot waves, climbing Mount Everest, and racing on a track with a T-Rex and King Kong as obstacles has to be a 10/10 experience. Not to mention, the ability to build The Iron Giant or own a Delorean is enough to bring the geek out of anyone.
Unfortunately, the futuristic world Spielberg created is not all that wonderful. Cities in the real world are massive disorganized slumps, and VR is the “drug” of the town. While the Oasis sounds great, living in boxcars that have been stacked on top of each other and walking in between mounds of stacked automobiles is not where we should be in 2040. Using virtual reality to escape a world full of issues is not the answer.
Although Ready Player One is full of everything there is to love about videogames and the limitless possibilities of virtual reality, there is a big problem with the way that Oasis is structured. The people of Oasis play together harmoniously, work together, make friends, and accomplish more in the game than they do in reality. However, the internet is not full of kind people, and although it is possible to find friends online, it’s much more likely to turn into racism, sexism, and bullying.
When video games first started out, the only people you could play with and against were your friends. Nowadays, players interact with millions of other players on a daily basis. Hiding behind screens mixed with frustrating games make a deadly combination, and tend to bring out the worst in people.
An open world RPG like what Holiday creates in Ready Player One is part of a larger genre of games, where bullying and harassment runs rampant. Players are given the freedom to roam a world and advance through sets of challenges, defeating other players. Gamers with higher level characters can end up bullying lower leveled players unintentionally, because they are easy targets. And since games of this genre tend to be super addictive, it’s not uncommon for players to return to the game even after being harassed.
While progressing through a game, doing so with a group of people can be much easier. However, the result can be a chain of toxic messages to players leaving them with two options: stop playing the game all together, or find a group of their own and start doing the same thing.
Finally, there is a category of gamers called “griefers”: people who play video games with the sole purpose of harassing other players. These individuals get a rush out of trolling, and frequently manipulate people to acquire real world information in order to continue their harassment outside of the game.
While I loved Ready Player One and the fantasy that came along with it, there are still an abundance of issues that prevent us from reaching the goal of harassment free video games. The movie is undoubtedly entertaining and full of life, but its representation of the online gaming community is far from accurate.