The premise is appealingly silly and insubstantial: It’s 2045, and the dystopian world has become unbearable. When Ready Player One came out, it felt like an escapist fantasy for gamers Warner Brosīack in 2011, it was almost impossible not to think about Ready Player One as harmless fun.

Gamergate changed the way we talk about geek culture, and in the end, it would make it borderline impossible to think about books like Ready Player One as harmless, meaningless fun. Gamergate was a toxic cultural battle filled with harassment so vicious it would become a major influence on the alt-right - but fundamentally, it was about who gets to be a geek, which parts of geek identity are worth lauding, and which parts are destructive. #Gamergate: Here's why everybody in the video game world is fighting And that’s because in 2015, the geek community of the internet was still in the throes of the seismic event known as Gamergate. In 2015, Cline released his second book, Armada, to a reception that looked a lot closer to the consensus on Ready Player One today than the consensus on Ready Player One in 2011. Luckily, there’s a perfect stepping stone that can help us understand exactly how this transition happened. What gives? How did the consensus on a single book go from “exuberant and meaningful fun!” to “everything that is wrong with the internet!” over the span of seven years?

It was “ a guaranteed pleasure.” It was “ witty.” It was not only “a simple bit of fun” but also “a rich and plausible picture of future friendships in a world not too distant from our own.” Reading the end of Ready Player One, opined a writer for Tor, “I felt like a kid who thinks eating an entire cake by himself sounded fun - I was sick of it, and craving something of real substance.”Ī time traveler from 2011 could be forgiven for being deeply confused by this response. “Many people find its take on games and so-called genre art to be a dull, pandering tableau of reference points as an end unto themselves,” the A.V. “ Ready Player One is a terrible book and it will be a terrible movie,” the Outline proclaimed. And the internet is ready and waiting to tell him why that’s a terrible idea. Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, an adaptation of the 2011 novel of the same name by Ernest Cline, is about to debut.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline