**lots of spoilers ahead**
I read Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One with my daughter — a bookworm and avid video game player — and was pleasantly surprised by what we found: a dystopian future where jobs are scant, mega-corporations control critical infrastructure and stop at nothing to grow and consolidate power, an energy crisis, a climate crisis, a food crisis, a homelessness crisis, and on and on.
This is the context in which Cline writes about OASIS: a hyperrealistic virtual world whose closest real-world analogue is the concept of the Metaverse, a term borrowed from another excellent sci-fi novel called Snow Crash.
In spite of its undeniable spectacle — made all the more visceral by the imagery in Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation — the OASIS in the book is fraught.
I saw the movie before I read the book, and I drew some conclusions about the book based on what I saw. I concluded that the OASIS would be framed in mostly positive terms, and that, while it may exist in a future with some problems, these problems would not be so central to the story. They’d get a nod. Just enough attention to set the stage but not so much that they play an important role. After all, the glimpses we get of real-world problems in the movie are constructed for maximum spectacle: stacks of RVs piled high in Columbus, Ohio:
The book does something else entirely.
It describes pervasive problems in the world (energy, climate, etc.) and frames the OASIS itself as another kind of problem; one I would call an uberproblem because it distracts (as it is designed to do) its users from working the problems that must be worked to avoid civilizational collapse. “Collapse” is not my word choice. Collapse is how Cline frames the stakes.
He allots almost three whole pages in the book (pp. 16-18 in my version) to describing the hellscape real world, and then caps it with this:
Human civilization is in decline. Some people even say it’s collapsing (Ready Player One, p. 18).
I wasn’t prepared for the book to describe a reality that provides OASIS users with the fuel they need to engage with it more and more. I was even less prepared for an essential take (in the book) on the nature of that engagement and, by extension, an essential take on the OASIS itself:
The essential take is this: the OASIS is not good, and the world would be better off without it.
And I mean without it without it. Destroyed without it. Not “turn-it-off-for-a-day-each-week-everything-in-moderation-lite” without it, which is how the movie resolves the issue.
Destruction is the only option because the OASIS is not actually an oasis. It’s a mirage, and Cline knows it, which is why, 200 pages into the book, Wade Watts/Parzival, the protagonist, says this:
I’d come to see my rig [for accessing the OASIS] for what it was: an elaborate contraption for deceiving my senses, to allow me to live in a world that didn’t exist. Each component… was a bar in the cell where I had willingly imprisoned myself (Ready Player One, p. 198).
The film never even hints at framing the OASIS as a prison. Instead, it frames working in indentured servitude for IOI — the mega-corporation aiming to capture control of the OASIS and exploit it for corporate profit — as prison-like, which, true enough, it is.
But, in the film, the OASIS is worth saving, and the dystopian backdrop of energy crises, climate crises, joblessness, and homelessness doesn’t exist in a meaningful way. This is the film that a younger James Halliday — the lone genius inventor who designed the OASIS in the book/movie — would have made, because the film turns on the same kind of escapist motivations that drove Halliday to build and evolve the OASIS in the first place.
But in making Halliday’s film, the filmmakers made a spectacle that does not grapple with the forces that brought the OASIS into being (a troubled childhood) nor the ones that fuel its expansion (see all the problems previously listed). The OASIS benefits from global crises, since global crises drive OASIS user engagement. That’s one messed up funnel!
Would you rather have a hyperrealistic virtual world where you can do and be anything for six days a week or a real world where, for example, people have enough to eat, a good roof over their heads, and no wars over land, energy, or food? When prioritizing one thing takes resources away from the work required to address the others, there’s a choice to make, and the choice says a lot about the choice-maker. In framing the OASIS as neither a mirage nor a prison, the filmmakers choose a future where continued-but-somewhat-but-not-really-limited user engagement is just fine.
And Cline ultimately leans into the same future vision in the book. The spectacle proves too compelling.
In the book, when the remaining members of the high five — the ragtag group with the best shot at taking down the evil corporation and winning control of the OASIS — prepare for their final assault, the co-founder of the business that built the OASIS, Ogden Morrow, captures the essence of this fascination with spectacle when he says, “[I’m going to sit] back and watch, of course! … This looks to be the most epic battle in videogame history” (Ready Player One, p. 325).
The battle is epic, no doubt, and it makes for fun reading, but the ending is a let down and a cop out. Cline wrote himself all the way up to the decision to destroy the OASIS—giving Parzival a big red “off” button that he could use if he judged destruction to be the right course of action—but, ultimately, he didn’t smash the button, and that’s the easy choice.
The OASIS may have some good qualities, but those qualities simply do not justify its existence in a world where there are energy crises, climate crises, job crises, homelessness, and famine. Shutting down the OASIS at least forces confrontation with reality and at most frees up resources to put towards problems that affect people’s day-to-day lives for the worse.
Contrast the way Cline ends Ready Player One with the way Tad Williams ends the Otherland tetralogy.
Otherland takes place about 40yrs later than Ready Player One in the 2080s where there is “widespread availability of full-immersion virtual reality… which allow people from all walks of life to access an online world, called simply the Net” (Wikipedia, 2025). Otherland — a hidden virtual world created by a cabal of super rich businesspeople and political elite with perverse dreams of immortality — is powered by something called the Grail network.
Otherland is at first mysterious but then quickly becomes dangerous and exploitative. It — like the OASIS — has some compelling qualities, but over the course of the series, it becomes clear that they do not outweigh its profoundly negative impact(s) on people and reality. Williams ends the book the way I hoped Cline would end Ready Player One: with an epic next level destruction of the Grail network.
He literally crashes a satellite housing a telepath whose brain is part of the engine that powers the Grail network into the physical, earth-bound infrastructure built to keep it online!
It’s both an epic destruction and a logical conclusion. The Grail network cannot exist given its reason for being and the processes undertaken to give it life. Likewise, if the OASIS is a prison — an elaborate deception that chips away at human connection and deprives reality of the resources it needs to work global problems — then there is only one way to end the story. Press the big red “off” button, and destroy it.
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My thoughts on Ready Player One’s ending notwithstanding, you should read it and Otherland and Snow Crash, and reach out to discuss them. If you plan to buy them, then try to buy from a local bookstore or via bookshop.org:
jordan beck, phd 