2.9 Reading response No.2

Ready Player One Written by Ernest Cline is about a dystopian future where everyone relies heavily on the virtual reality world known as the Oasis. When the creator, Halliday, dies he leaves behind his legacy and control over the Oasis as a prize to anyone who can find the 3 keys to unlock the Easter Egg he left behind. The world becomes obsessed with the search for these keys with corporations such as Innovative Online Industries ( IOI ), fueling millions of dollars into their discovery.  IOI will stop at nothing to attain total and complete control over the Oasis.  Wade Watts, a poor teenager is thrown into the chaos when he unexpectedly discovers the first key.

Ready Player One puts into perspective the greed that all humans have. Everyone who has access to the Oasis searches for the keys left behind by Halliday. IOI has hundreds of thousands of people working for them night and day to discover the keys, known as Sixers. IOI represents greed and imitates the big corporations such as Apple and Samsung that try and control our actual lives.  “Now they were trying to seize control”,  IOI seeks to control the Oasis so they can basically “rule the world”.  I feel like this books explores the ideas of how people desire power, control and money way too much.  Companies and corporations spend years finding different ways to take our money and control us. Everyone goes to extreme lengths to be better than everyone else and have the most money.

“I earned enough to keep from going hungry”, Wade Watts didn’t have any money and wasn’t controlled by greed which is why he was best suited to find Halliday’s Easter Egg. There was no risk of him being controlled by power and greed because he didn’t want the money or the power and yet he was happy. “We’re going to use all of the moolah we just won to feed everyone on the planet”, This quote proves that even after winning an unimaginable amount of money Wade would rather give it away than spend it on himself. Ernest Cline through the characters of Wade Watts and the Sixers has shown me to look at things in my own life and see whether I really need them to be happy or is it just greed that tells me I need to have them.  I feel that money and greed dictates too much of what we do in our lives. We as humans believe that money will bring us happiness, when it will only bring us more greed. A real world example is stock market investment, in which people gamble there money on the chance of making more. People take the chance that they might make millions of the few thousand that the originally invested. The money the had originally is more than enough to make them happy but greed drives them to want more.

If your a fan of video games you will thoroughly enjoy the content in this book, however I would still recommend this book to anyone, any age. Ready Player One is fast paced keeping you captivated from the first page. I believe that the ideas presented by Ernest Cline in the text are relevant to all ages, because everyone, at any age can allow greed and the desire to be better than everyone else drive them.

One Reply to “2.9 Reading response No.2”

  1. Tom, firstly, you have given a great summary of the text: concise and poignant to key plot details.
    – Point One would benefit from having additional quotations to support the plot details, you are referring to.
    – One way you could strengthen your final responses to the text is to specifically provide wider-world examples for the points that you are making.

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