Dystopia of Ready Player One

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The Dystopia of Ready Player One The Earth that is portrayed in Ready Player One sucks. Wade Watts, the main character, calls the world's situation “the human condition” and describes it as “not good” (Cline, Ready Player One, 16). He begins to tell us the story of how he found out, through the libraries located in the OASIS. The world is going through a “Global Energy Crisis,” which was brought about by the consumption of fossil fuels (Cline, Ready Player One, 17). This is the dystopia that Cline paints for us, and, unsurprisingly, it's not that far-fetched from where we are now, as a society. Society in the novel does not have enough energy to function as smoothly as it did before, and because of the burning of the fossil fuels, climate change is effecting the environment, and plant and animal species are dying off in record numbers, leaving many people homeless and starving (Cline, Ready Player One, 17). These two pages is really the only time when we get told what is going on in Wade's world, since most of the novel is taking place inside of the OASIS. Even though we only really get a glimpse of what is going on in the real world, the dystopian nature of it is what essentially drives the plot of the novel. The OASIS is a massively multi-player online roleplaying game, created by a man named James Halliday. It is played by pretty much the entire population of the world. Since the world in the novel seems so hopeless to the characters, it is a way for them to escape the real world, and live essentially in the perfect world it provides. The OASIS became even more popular after Halliday's death. He hid an easter egg inside of the game, and he set up a series of puzzles to solve, and whoever found the egg first, would receive his entire fortune. Wade says “The Hunt, as the contest came to be known, quickly wove its way into global culture” (Cline, Ready Player
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