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Ready Player One - SDCC Teaser

HStallion

Now what's the next step in your master plan?
Nerds eat their own lol. Never read the book, but the teaser seems like a love letter to nerd culture. The good, irreverent aspects.

Personally I only eat other nerds while drinking Ectocooler that was inspired by the classic movie Ghost Buster's while wearing my He Man pajamas on my GI Joe plate in a room designed to look just like the Millennium Falcon to the sound track of the Goonies
 
This is the first time I've been exposed to this and I'm not impressed. Simulated reality has been done and done before. Theres car races with DeLoreans and video game characters. That sounds boring. I'll wait for a trailer tailored for general audiences. Clearly this was aimed at getting ComicConerds hyped.
 

jstripes

Banned
The book has its charms, GAF is being absurdly negative. There is some cringeworthy dialogue, and some clumsy reveals, but it is a charmer from beginning to end. The book is immensely readable. It was the rare kindle book I read without once checking what percentage through it I was. It's a book written to provide pleasure and a sense of recognition for those well-versed in the pop-culture it is a tribute to. It is a fun escapist fantasy that imagines a world in which pop culture trivia has a greater utility than bar trivia, a a world in which the observer is transformed into the hero.

The book has some interesting observations to make about our modern relationship with our digital lives. It deals with a world in which the real world has collapsed while the digital dreamworld has grown more and more satisfying and compelling. There is a tension between the purity of the digital world created for play, and the profit-driven intentions of an evil conglomerate. The hero is entirely isolated and friendless, but completely immersed in a digital quest that provides him with an identity and a sense of purpose. Too close to home, GAF?

I can't understand why the book seems to provoke such ire on GAF. I feel like perhaps GAF is SO entirely the target demographic for the book that they can't help but pick it apart and imagine how THEY would have done it better.

Cline is no Ian McEwan, but he wrote a charming escapist jaunt with its heart in the right place. Good fun if approached in the right spirit.

Some of us have or desire an identity that is greater than the sum of trivial knowledge of movies and tv shows. This book/movie is just a shallow validation of the desire to be nothing more than a zero-personality walking datastore of references.
 
The idea that NeoGAF is the only place (or is an outlier) to this sort of arms-length pushback against the book and the movie seems misleading.
 

lt519

Member
Didn't know the book was so hated here on GAF, I enjoyed it, along with a ton of my friends. But people also hated The Martian. I think GAFs taste in books is waaay off from the general public. His second book Armada was trash though.

However, jamming references into a movie isn't going to work as well as they think it will..
 

_Nemo

Member
I can't even begin to imagine what that would look like lol

lol..I don't know, seems like something right up his alley. I remember reading somewhere a few years ago that his next movie might be Ready Player One. It was around the time Interstellar was released.
 
D

Deleted member 22576

Unconfirmed Member
I started reading the book last night to see what all the fuss is about. It's alright so far, I've read about 1/10th of it.

Doesn't hold a candle to Stephenson so far but those books were really really wacky too. Idk. The Diamond Age opens up with a dude implanting a new facegun into his... face. He keeps the scars because they look cool.

I feel like all famous VR fiction has a certain word soup hyper ADD style of writing.
 

JCHandsom

Member
Didn't know the book was so hated here on GAF, I enjoyed it, along with a ton of my friends. But people also hated The Martian. I think GAFs taste in books is waaay off from the general public.

It's fine that you like it. I hope the movie is good and I'm interested to see what Spielberg does. But to say you liked a book and that people hated The Martian and state that means criticisms of RPO are "waaay off" isn't a defense of the book. There are always going to be people who don't like something good; that doesn't mean that it isn't good. The opposite is true as well; people liking something bad doesn't make it good. Plenty of examples have been posetd demonstrating RPOs badness, so it's disingenuous to say that people are off the mark when you all you've said about the book is "I enjoyed it."
 
Nerds eat their own lol. Never read the book, but the teaser seems like a love letter to nerd culture. The good, irreverent aspects.
But that's the thing. The book doesn't respect "nerd culture." It clearly thinks it's doing so, but it's in fact doing the exact opposite because the author has internalized the argument that video games, movies, television, etc, are all completely useless that information became necessary to save the world or some such thing and so that's precisely the world the author creates: a world where his knowledge and his knowledge alone is the key to winning, and therefore proving that it was worthwhile. The entire point is proving the "haters" wrong through that type of thing.

But the cold irony is that in doing so, he proved them right because he was unable to actually defend them on their own merits and could only go "well, yeah, but what if this information was useful?" It's not enough to be fun or enjoyable--it has to be the key to success to be worthwhile. And because of that, while all the info is useful in the world of the book, he admits that it is in fact all a complete waste of time in the real world, or else the entire premise of the book falls flat. There's just a complete absence for an actual defense for simply enjoying this stuff for it's own sake, or any realization that there's no actual reason that enjoying that stuff isn't something that needs to be defended to begin with. The enjoyment itself is enough. No further defense is needed. But the author has internalized that train of thought to such a degree that he not only feels it does need to be defended, but the only way he can think of for it to have been worthwhile was if those experiences were in fact the key to success.

Something that fails to defend pop culture on its own merits like that, that tacitly admits not only is it simply being fun in of itself not enough and instead of talking about something like that (one's personal enjoyment and experiences with this stuff) unironically makes the argument that the only way it's possibly worthwhile is if there was some greater purpose for it after all, the exact thing they were trying to mock and prove wrong, and beyond which can only offer an endless barrage of glorified commercials and Wikpedia pages of pop culture that isn't sure if it's supposed to actually be trying to tug at people's nostalgia strings or be trying to explain what Earth pop culture is to an alien species that wouldn't have a clue where to begin and trying to go after both audiences at the same time, seems the exact opposite of a love letter to me, but that's me.

TL;DR version: The entire book is:
Person 1: Video games and stuff are totally useless. Why waste your time with them?
Person 2: But what if they were useful? What if that stuff could even maybe save the world and stuff?
P1: Okay, but that's not the world we live in and changes nothing here...
P2: But what if it was the key to success though?????
P1: Okay, so what... You're admitting all that stuff is in fact useless?
P2: Well, yeah, but what if it was useful though????? Wouldn't that be the most amazing thing ever???? And not just pop culture at large, but the pop culture that I personally have absorbed (fuck everyone else's experiences. Only min matter.) Wouldn't that be the best??????

Yeah... Forgive me if I don't see that as a love letter to much of anything.
 

Inkwell

Banned
I remember how excited I was to read the book. Someone that I trusted recommended it, plus the concept sounded amazing. Oh, how wrong I was...

The film can't be any worse though, right? At least there won't be a narrator explaining every reference to the audience.
 

Ambient80

Member
So the little tones at the end when the title words are lighting up, am I hallucinating or are the same notes used in the beginning of the song “Imagination” from Willy Wonka? Maybe that’s intentional? Lol. I dunno

I see others heard it too. You can call me Captain Obvious.
 

lt519

Member
It's fine that you like it. I hope the movie is good and I'm interested to see what Spielberg does. But to say you liked a book and that people hated The Martian and state that means criticisms of RPO are "waaay off" isn't a defense of the book. There are always going to be people who don't like something good; that doesn't mean that it isn't good. The opposite is true as well; people liking something bad doesn't make it good. Plenty of examples have been posetd demonstrating RPOs badness, so it's disingenuous to say that people are off the mark when you all you've said about the book is "I enjoyed it."

Defensive? I neither said the book was good nor bad, nor that the criticisms we're wrong. Just that myself, my friends, and the general public enjoyed it. I enjoy a good B-Movie as well, no shame in enjoying Kong Skull Island (actually haven't seen it), not everything has to be Oscar/Hugo material. It was written by an amateur and meant to be a fun romp down memory lane. Not a long standing literary classic.

Just pointing out GAF is in the minority on not liking this one. And yes, I'm sure if you went onto other lit discussion boards they'd rip it apart as well.
 

GhaleonEB

Member
I've never heard of the source material, but watching the trailer...it doesn't look very interesting at all. But it's Spielberg, so I'll keep an eye out for it.

Did they really call it the holy grail of pop culture, what the fuck.
 

HStallion

Now what's the next step in your master plan?
Defensive? I neither said the book was good nor bad, nor that the criticisms we're wrong. Just that myself, my friends, and the general public enjoyed it. I enjoy a good B-Movie as well, no shame in enjoying Kong Skull Island (actually haven't seen it), not everything has to be Oscar/Hugo material. It was written by an amateur and meant to be a fun romp down memory lane. Not a long standing literary classic.

Just pointing out GAF is in the minority on not liking this one. And yes, I'm sure if you went onto other lit discussion boards they'd rip it apart as well.

Its derided outside of GAF as well so can we stop with this nonsense. That and him being an amateur is a lame excuse. So was JK Rowling with her first Harry Potter book.
 
I neither said the book was good nor bad, nor that the criticisms we're wrong. Just that myself, my friends, and the general public enjoyed it. I enjoy a good B-Movie as well, no shame in enjoying Kong Skull Island (actually haven't seen it), not everything has to be Oscar/Hugo material.

Just pointing out GAF is in the minority on not liking this one. And yes, I'm sure if you went onto other lit discussion boards they'd rip it apart as well.

I don't know that this needs to be a "GAF"-centric thing though. These feelings are not confined to here, nor are they particularly amplified here, I don't think.

Also, you're kinda sharing the same argument Cline is pushing in his own book the second you go to "Well, not everything has to be Oscar/Hugo material." You're ceding the point that whatever it is you're trying to defend doesn't really have much merit on its own, much like Cline is buying into the (bad) argument that pop culture is worthless and is trying to create a fictional reality where it's THE MOST IMPORTANT THING as a response.

It doesn't have to be Oscar material, and nobody's really criticizing it because it's not Oscar material, either. They're criticizing as a basic work of fiction on its own merits (although some people are drawing comparisons to Stephenson and other authors). And as a work of fiction, just middle of the road popular science fiction, it apparently doesn't do much than self-congratulate for having paid attention to what was on any nearby TV set in the 1980s.
 

nicoga3000

Saint Nic
I'm confused.

The comicbook.com mirror in the second post is of a movie that looks NOTHING like the book I remember reading. What's going on?
 

jstripes

Banned
TL;DR version: The entire book is:
Person 1: Video games and stuff are totally useless. Why waste your time with them?
Person 2: But what if they were useful? What if that stuff could even maybe save the world and stuff?
P1: Okay, but that's not the world we live in and changes nothing here...
P2: But what if it was the key to success though?????
P1: Okay, so what... You're admitting all that stuff is in fact useless?
P2: Well, yeah, but what if it was useful though????? Wouldn't that be the most amazing thing ever???? And not just pop culture at large, but the pop culture that I personally have absorbed (fuck everyone else's experiences. Only min matter.) Wouldn't that be the best??????

TPkZa1O.gif
 

JCHandsom

Member
Defensive? I neither said the book was good nor bad, nor that the criticisms we're wrong. Just that myself, my friends, and the general public enjoyed it. I enjoy a good B-Movie as well, no shame in enjoying Kong Skull Island (actually haven't seen it), not everything has to be Oscar/Hugo material. It was written by an amateur and meant to be a fun romp down memory lane. Not a long standing literary classic.

You don't have to be Oscar/Hugo level material to be good, and Kong Skull Island is better than RPO. A more accurate comparison would be that there is no shame in enjoying Twilight (for one thing they're both books), and there isn't. That doesn't mean there isn't value in criticizing RPOs failings.
 

Kadin

Member
I don't know that this needs to be a "GAF"-centric thing though. These feelings are not confined to here, nor are they particularly amplified here, I don't think.

Also, you're kinda sharing the same argument Cline is pushing in his own book the second you go to "Well, not everything has to be Oscar/Hugo material." You're ceding the point that whatever it is you're trying to defend doesn't really have much merit on its own, much like Cline is buying into the (bad) argument that pop culture is worthless and is trying to create a fictional reality where it's THE MOST IMPORTANT THING as a response.

It doesn't have to be Oscar material, and nobody's really criticizing it because it's not Oscar material, either. They're criticizing as a basic work of fiction on its own merits (although some people are drawing comparisons to Stephenson and other authors). And as a work of fiction, just middle of the road popular science fiction, it apparently doesn't do much than self-congratulate for having paid attention to what was on any nearby TV set in the 1980s.
I'd be curious to see where the hate for the book is more prevalent than it is here on GAF in this thread specifically. I never read any other threads about the book here but I have to imagine it's pretty similar. Have you seen other specific sites that are just as bad, I'm curious because I haven't seen that.
 
Ready Player One is basically a fedora-wearing neckbeard in book form. I wish I could find some excerpts where the protagonist is talking to his female love interest. Yikes.
 
I'd be curious to see where the hate for the book is more prevalent than it is here on GAF in this thread specifically.

Twitter & Facebook are both larger social networks than this one where this sort of response to the book is fairly common. Comments sections at entertainment press outlets are also, I'd imagine, about as unkind. I'm not sure what Reddit, 4chan, or Something Awful feel about it, but then considering the general makeup of its userbase, I wouldn't be surprised if either of those three messageboards/discussion forums treat it worse.

The book was recieved well, obviously. Well enough to sell a lot of copies, get optioned, and turned into a Spielberg movie. But has time has gone on and the generally superficial self-congratulation of "Geek Culture HELL YEAH" died down, the primary charms of the book diminished with it, so you're left with a lot of people either disillusioned with the quality after their purchase, or late enough to the party that they don't understand how/why people coulda liked this.
 

commish

Jason Kidd murdered my dog in cold blood!
I'd be curious to see where the hate for the book is more prevalent than it is here on GAF in this thread specifically. I never read any other threads about the book here but I have to imagine it's pretty similar. Have you seen other specific sites that are just as bad, I'm curious because I haven't seen that.

The book has a rating of 4.31 out of 5 on Goodreads with over 400,000 ratings.

Oh but don't worry. The hate is definitely not a GAF thing. It's near universal.
 

Kadin

Member
Twitter & Facebook are both larger social networks than this one where this sort of response to the book is fairly common. Comments sections at entertainment press outlets are also, I'd imagine, about as unkind. I'm not sure what Reddit, 4chan, or Something Awful feel about it, but then considering the general makeup of its userbase, I wouldn't be surprised if either of those three messageboards/discussion forums treat it worse.

The book was recieved well, obviously. Well enough to sell a lot of copies, get optioned, and turned into a Spielberg movie. But has time has gone on and the generally superficial self-congratulation of "Geek Culture HELL YEAH" died down, the primary charms of the book diminished with it, so you're left with a lot of people either disillusioned with the quality after their purchase, or late enough to the party that they don't understand how/why people coulda liked this.
It's definitely not something I see on Reddit, especially within the actual video post that went up yesterday. I'm not saying there aren't people there that aren't a fan, it's simply not as noticeable there and/or they get downvoted quick to become hidden. Here I see a ton of single sentence comments along the lines of, "I'm not watching this book trash," etc. Not much context offered, just a quick shot at how much they hated it without explaining why. Some have gone into detail but the majority have not.
 

commish

Jason Kidd murdered my dog in cold blood!
Yeah and the rankings on IMDB mean so much.

Ummm I'm going to go out on a limb and say that lots of people enjoyed the book. Because they've written reviews saying they did and rated it highly.

I'm not sure what your point is. That most people actually don't like it?

No one is saying that it's the next great piece of American literature. But most people found it a fun read.
 

Dan

No longer boycotting the Wolfenstein franchise
People sure are getting bent out of shape to defend this 'writing'.

When it came to my research, I never took any shortcuts. Over the past five years, I'd worked my way down the entire recommended gunter reading list. Douglas Adams. Kurt Vonnegut. Neal Stephenson. Richard K. Morgan. Stephen King. Orson Scott Card. Terry Pratchett. Terry Brooks. Bester, Bradbury, Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Vance, Gibson, Gaiman, Sterling, Moorcock, Scalzi, Zelazny. I read every novel by every single one of Halliday's favorite authors.
And I didn't stop there.
I also watched every single film he referenced in the Almanac. If it was one of Halliday's favorites, like WarGames, Ghostbusters, Real Genius, Better Off Dead, or Revenge of the Nerds, I rewatched it until I knew every scene by heart.
I devoured each of what Halliday referred to as "The Holy Trilogies": Star Wars (original and prequel trilogies, in that order), Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Mad Max, Back to the Future, and Indiana Jones. (Halliday once said that he preferred to pretend the other Indiana Jones films, from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull onward, didn't exist. I tended to agree.)
I also absorbed the complete filmographies of each of his favorite directors. Cameron, Gilliam, Jackson, Fincher, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg, Del Toro, Tarantino. And, of course, Kevin Smith.
I spent three months studying every John Hughes teen movie and memorizing all the key lines of dialogue.
Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive.
You could say I covered all the bases.
I studied Monty Python. And not just Holy Grail, either. Every single one of their films, albums, and books, and every episode of the original BBC series. (Including those two "lost" episodes they did for German television.)
I wasn't going to cut any corners.
I wasn't going to miss something obvious.
Somewhere along the way, I started to go overboard.
I may, in fact, have started to go a little insane.
I watched every episode of The Greatest American Hero, Airwolf, The A-Team, Knight Rider, Misfits of Science, and The Muppet Show.
What about The Simpsons, you ask?
I knew more about Springfield than I knew about my own city.
Star Trek? Oh, I did my homework. TOS, TNG, DS9. Even Voyager and Enterprise. I watched them all in chronological order. The movies, too. Phasers locked on target.
I gave myself a crash course in '80s Saturday-morning cartoons.
I learned the name of every last goddamn Gobot and Transformer.
Land of the Lost, Thundarr the Barbarian, He-Man, Schoolhouse Rock!, G.I. Joe - I knew them all. Because knowing is half the battle.
Who was my friend, when things got rough? H.R. Pufnstuf.
Japan? Did I cover Japan?
Yes. Yes indeed. Anime and live-action. Godzilla, Gamera, Star Blazers, The Space Giants, and G-Force. Go, Speed Racer, Go.
I wasn't some dilettante.
I wasn't screwing around.
I memorized every last Bill Hicks stand-up routine.
Music? Well, covering all the music wasn't easy.
It took some time.
The '80s was a long decade (ten whole years), and Halliday didn't seem to have had very discerning taste. He listened to everything. So I did too. Pop, rock, new wave, punk, heavy metal. From the Police to Journey to R.E.M. to the Clash. I tackled it all.
I burned through the entire They Might Be Giants discography in under two weeks. Devo took a little longer.
I watched a lot of YouTube videos of cute geeky girls playing '80s cover tunes on ukuleles. Technically, this wasn't part of my research, but I had a serious cute-geeky-girls-playing-ukuleles fetish that I can neither explain nor defend.
I memorized lyrics. Silly lyrics, by bands with names like Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, and Pink Floyd.
I kept at it.
I burned the midnight oil.
Did you know that Midnight Oil was an Australian band, with a 1987 hit titled "Beds Are Burning"?
I was obsessed. I wouldn't quit. My grades suffered. I didn't care.
I read every issue of every comic book title Halliday had ever collected.
I wasn't going to have anyone questioning my commitment.
Especially when it came to the videogames.
Videogames were my area of expertise.
My double-weapon specialization.
My dream Jeopardy! category.
I downloaded every game mentioned or referenced in the Almanac, from Akalabeth to Zaxxon. I played each title until I had mastered it, then moved on to the next one.
You'd be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, is a lot of study time.
Standing on the left side of the runway was my battle-worn X-wing fighter. Parked on the right side was my DeLorean. Sitting on the runway itself was my most frequently used spacecraft, the Vonnegut. Max had already powered up the engines, and they emitted a low, steady roar that filled the hangar. The Vonnegut was a heavily modified Firefly-class transport vessel, modeled after the Serenity in the classic Firefly TV series. The ship had been named the Kaylee when I’d first obtained it, but I’d immediately rechristened it after one of my favorite twentieth-century novelists. Its new name was stenciled on the side of its battered gray hull. I’d looted the Vonnegut from a cadre of Oviraptor clansmen who had foolishly attempted to hijack my X-wing while I was cruising through a large group of worlds in Sector Eleven known as the Whedonverse.
 

JCHandsom

Member
Ummm I'm going to go out on a limb and say that lots of people enjoyed the book. Because they've written reviews saying they did and rated it highly.

I'm not sure what your point is. That most people actually don't like it?

No one is saying that it's the next great piece of American literature. But most people found it a fun read.

People liking something =/= Quality. Tons of people like bad/poorly written things all the time, like Bayformers of 50 Shades of Gray.
 

hobozero

Member
Ready Player One is basically a fedora-wearing neckbeard in book form. I wish I could find some excerpts where the protagonist is talking to his female love interest. Yikes.

Haven't read the book, but saw this in a review. Is this the protagonist speaking?

“Now, spill it. Are you a woman? And by that I mean are you a human female who has never had a sex-change operation?”

That's seriously fucked up.

I do feel bad for ragging on a book I haven't read though, so I will stop. I will say that the trailer did nothing for me - beyond some detail about the setting the trailer told me nothing about the story or why I should watch the movie beyond "Hey remember this thing??" CGI extravaganza alone is not enough of a hook anymore.
 

commish

Jason Kidd murdered my dog in cold blood!
People liking something =/= Quality. Tons of people like bad/poorly written things all the time, like Bayformers of 50 Shades of Gray.

That's just it though. No one is saying it's quality writing. I said as much in my post. I'm saying that lots of people enjoyed it for what it is. If you read it and didn't, then great. It's not for you.
 

Moose Biscuits

It would be extreamly painful...
I bought the book for my friend as a present because I heard it was good without reading it. I'm going to go apologise to him for giving him it.
 

lt519

Member
That's just it though. No one is saying it's quality writing. I said as much in my post. I'm saying that lots of people enjoyed it for what it is. If you read it and didn't, then great. It's not for you.

The first response to my initial post shows they are only out for blood and confirmation of their invested hatred of it. I simply said me and my friends enjoyed it and GAF has different tastes, which spawned a reply about how poor the quality of the book is and a defensive tirade of how "other people hate it too!" It's not a discussion to be had, they've been at it since page 1, which I'm now realizing after reading most the thread. I regret even posting in here haha.
 

I Wanna Be The Guy

U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!
I have never heard of this before but reading the insane HATE in this thread made me curious so I watched thr trailer. Premise seems neat. I'm interested. Will make sure to see it when it releases. Who knows, I might enjoy it. If so, thanks GAF!
 
Y'know, seeing a modern movie action sequence with the DeLorean in it makes me really want a new BTTF movie. Not a reboot, maybe a sequel? I don't know. But the thought of some kind of high-speed chase with the DeLorean not only going back-and-forth from wheeled to hover-mode, but even having the chase take place through time as well, with the driver strategically shifting through eras to use the geography or buildings to their advantage, would just be so fucking cool.
 

JCHandsom

Member
The first response to my initial post shows they are only out for blood and confirmation of their invested hatred of it. I simply said me and my friends enjoyed it and GAF has different tastes, which spawned a reply about how poor the quality of the book is and a defensive tirade of how "other people hate it too!" It's not a discussion to be had, they've been at it since page 1, which I'm now realizing after reading most the thread. I regret even posting in here haha.

Criticizing bad things for being bad doesn't mean I'm "out for blood." It's okay to enjoy bad things, and it's okay to get into why a bad thing is bad. You do you though, I'm not one to judge, because I like bad things too!
 
I remember how excited I was to read the book. Someone that I trusted recommended it, plus the concept sounded amazing. Oh, how wrong I was...

The film can't be any worse though, right? At least there won't be a narrator explaining every reference to the audience.

Probably that hack Leo Laporte. After reading the book, I realized Leo has no personal taste and always chase after the popular thing. I promptly unsubscribed all TWIT podcasts.

This movie is Speilberg turning Leo Laporte.
 
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