Ready Player One: A Review

Oh, Ready Player One, how you disappoint me.

I wanted to love this book. It's about games and gamers! And a dystopian future! And also the 1980s! What's not to love? But on reading, this book provided grim evidence to me that a great idea is nothing without a great execution backing it up. Warning: Spoilers ahoy.

My first and most pervasive issue with Ready Player One is the actual prose. The language is dead, completely lacking in music. Worse, the whole thing is riddled with telling, not showing, particularly in the first two thirds of the book. Similarly, exposition is nonstop and completely graceless. Sure, it's great that Parzival falls in love with Art3mis through a series of conversations and emails, but can some of that please go onto the page? Could we please see the adventures in which Parzival befriends Shoto and Daito? The story is too much like how you'd tell a friend you ran into on the sidewalk about what happened to you last week. Don't tell us you're in love, you're a badass, you're an expert. Demonstrate it through the actions and reactions of characters acting in the story.

There are also plot holes and logical inconsistencies so vast you could park a squadron of bombers in them. We're expected to believe, for example, that Wade has consumed and absolutely memorized twenty to thirty years of pop culture in a mere five years -- note that many of the references in this book are actually 1970s culture, and some even 1960s. And we're expected to believe that these cultural artifacts speak to the kids of the 2040s in exactly the same ways they spoke to audiences when they were created. How much more interesting would this book be if it presented a skewed view of 80s culture, misunderstood because of the decades of cultural and technological change in between?

We're also expected to believe that once Parzival becomes a world-famous player, signing endorsement deals and a super-high level, he still has to work a full-time low-grade help desk job to pay his bills. But look, if we're supposed to believe the in-game currency is one of the most stable currencies in the world, and Parzival is such a bad-ass, surely he could earn more per hour doing a little strategic grinding for gold?

Later, Parzival has the skills to ace employee evaluation tests as though he had a degree on computer science. Tests based on 2040s technology. Despite spending every free second obsessively studying 1980s pop culture and technology. Exactly when and where did he pick up those skills?

It's 25 cents to have a lifetime account on Oasis, the benchmark for free and open access... but once you're in you can't... go anywhere or do anything without more money...? I have a lot of trouble working out how Wade has spent many of the happiest days and hours of his life in Oasis, while at the same time he's only level 3 and can't really leave the school planet. The game described in the book, too, is shockingly literal in a way that is simply irrelevant to a virtual world where you can keep adding real estate, where you can instance anything you like, where a tiny shack on the outside can be a glorious palace on the inside because space is what you say it is.

And why, precisely, would winning the egg hunt give IOI control over Oasis...? A little hand-wavey. And -- wait, in five years, there hadn't sprung up a black-hat group to snag the Oasis source code and win by looking up the answers? No inside job? Not for $240-ish billion dollars? Really? Once you start looking, the inconsistencies flow like water.

For five years, not one person thought to examine that interesting arrangement of rocks on Ludus, not even by chance, and make that connection. In my own professional experience of making games based on clues not unlike those in Ready Player One, crowds are always smarter than individuals -- in the real world, that egg hunt would have been over in hours. Maybe days. But that's a little too inside-baseball to expect, I suppose. 

From the feminist angle, I was prepared to give the whole thing an F: Two women, one long dead, both of whom act primarily as love interests for the big important men in the story and don't seem to have complex motivations beyond that. We're almost recovered by the discovery that Aech is a woman -- and not just any woman, but a black lesbian. Any goodwill earned by this, though, was completely lost by choosing to continue calling Aech a he afterward. SMASH. Points for effort: D minus.

None of these things is unforgivable on its own, but in combination, they eventually mount up to an assault on your credulity that puts the whole story on shaky footing. It does pick up quite a lot toward the end, when you finally get lots and lots of showing-not-telling, the pacing improves, and the exposition slows down. By the end, I no longer hated the book.

But that still doesn't make it a good book.

The whole thing reads like straight white male nerd wish fulfillment, a desperate attempt to pretend that time sunk into the youthful pursuits of arcade culture meant something. But it means something already: All those hours made bonds and communities and a shared consensus culture. It made the world just a little kinder and gentler by giving us things we could care about together. You don't have to save a girl or the world for that.

I Am Not a Transmedia Producer

The go-to job title for transmedia work these days seems to be "transmedia producer." As a result, I've been getting a statistically significant number of pings from projects looking for such a transmedia producer; after all, I'm a transmedia person, right? And I'm definitely hustling for work. So surely it's a perfect fit!

But in my lexicon, drawn largely from games and marketing work, a producer is the same thing as a project manager. A producer manages budgets and timelines, obtains approvals, wrangles logistical details. A producer manages the practical and technical half of the equation, not the creative half.

This might be heartbreak caused by differences in cross-industry lingo -- I think in film a producer often has a much more creative role, on top of the basic logistical one. (Correct me if I'm wrong?)

Dealing with those logistics is a crucial, necessary role, and to be fair it's one I've done before -- indeed, I did quite a lot of production work for Perplex City. But it's really not my strong suit these days, and hiring me to do it is a poor use of your money. Those who remember the early days of the IGDA ARG SIG may recall that my arithmetic is legendarily bad. I never once sent out a chat announcement having calculated all of the time zones correctly. Accordingly, I do much, much better in projects where there is someone else handling that incredibly important budgets-and-timelines work.

Me, I'm all about crafting words and interactions. I'm a writer. A content creator. A builder of imaginary cities and conspiracies and lives, either out of nothing at all or built on the foundation of someone else's work. You want a puzzle about genealogy, a lovelorn Tweet stream, a forum full of chatty vampires, a secret history of bees, an encrypted message from Jupiter, six weeks of scripts filled with filthy jokes, then yeah, I'm your girl, let's talk. But if that's what you're looking for, I humbly suggest that you give that role a job title that does not have "producer" in it.

You want someone to make and manage a budget? I love you, you're wonderful, but alas, you're better off finding somebody else for your project. But do call me when you're looking for a creative, as the ad people say.

Making Isn't Enough

You've probably heard a common refrain in the transmedia scene: "Just make something." It's the wisdom of centuries of artists before us -- you can talk forever, but you never become a creator if you don't actually apply all that theory. Writers write. 

There's also a honing-your-craft angle to it; we writers say you have to write a million words of crap before you start writing anything good. Practice makes perfect: You have to try and fail a few times just to get the hang of most things, much less to make anything you're proud to hang your name on.

But a conversation with Transmedia Talk's own Nick Braccia a few days ago has me realizing that a lot more goes into climbing the skill ladder than just milling out content. There are writers who churn out millions of words of manuscripts in a year, each worse than the last; there are transmedia creators who likewise make disjointed and unfocused projects that never quite hang together into a cohesive whole. So here are five things that an ambitious creator will do, even above and beyond that old standby, "Make something."

1. Learn from work like yours. One of the most common ways of breaking into transmedia is inventing it. But when you do work in a vacuum, you're doing a huge disservice to yourself, your project, and your audience, because you aren't climbing onto the shoulders of those who have gone before you so you can see a little further. There's no sense reinventing the wheel. When you're wishing there were an easier or better way to do something, check to make sure someone hasn't already found one.

2. Talk to other creators. Sometimes learning from public examples isn't enough; become friendly with others doing similar projects, and trade information about roads not taken, close calls, war stories that might change how you do something. Sometimes a project that looked OK on the surface was a nightmare behind the scenes, and that's important to know if you don't want a nightmare on your hands, too. 

3. Make every decision mindfully. Make sure you very clearly understand all of the parts of your project and how they fit together. At every step know what work is being done -- characterization, exposition, furthering the plot, making the user experience better. That applies to written and video content, to design and interface elements, to challenges, everything. If you can't explain why you're making the choices you have for everything from platform distribution to font choices, then you haven't yet thought it through well enough.

4. Seek out criticism of your work. This one is hard. Really, really hard. Partly that's because it's difficult to hear criticism of something you love; it can feel weirdly personal and put you on the defensive. (You have to get over that, sunshine, if you want to go pro.) But the other reason is that honest and robust criticism is rare in the transmedia space. There's snark between friends in private, to be sure, but very little moves into the public sphere. Try to get your hands on that honest criticism, be it from your audience, from other creators, from your dev team, or anywhere else you can find it. Feedback is valuable above jewels, and you should make it a priority if you want to actually get better at this stuff.

5. Own your failures. This one's hard, too, but mainly because of pride: Don't buy your own hype. Don't believe your press releases. Know when you've totally screwed up, and admit it to yourself. That's the first step to working out why and preventing a repeat. Even when you haven't totally screwed up, though, even for magnificent and award-winning work, turn your analytic eye to every part of a project once it's done to see what could've been done better. And then make something else -- better.

Of course, it's true that none of this applies if you haven't taken that first step, that step where you actually make something. But there's a lot more to doing good work than putting together any old inspiration and tossing it in front of an unwitting public. I can't guarantee that these five steps will turn you into a rockstar transmedia creator overnight, of course. But I promise you if you aren't doing these things, your path to the top will take a whole lot longer -- and you may never get there at all.

Journeys to Awesometown

The world is completely full of awesome things right now -- as it always is -- and here are three I would like to call your attention to.

The first is author Leonard Richardson's project Constellation Games. This is a story about first contact and video games being told as a serial, and if you suspected there were some transmedia-ish elements to it, you would not be wrong! My favorite line from the sample chapters: "Crying isn't sadness; it happens because an emotion is too big for your body." They've cleverly put together Kickstarter-like reward levels, so you can choose just to get the serial, or you can add on bonuses like an alien phrasebook or bonus short stories. Rad.

And speaking of Kickstarter -- ARG fans will already be well famliar with the unstoppable and irresistible Jan Libby. You should also know that she's turning last winter's beloved Snow Town ARG into an iOS app -- check out the Kickstarter and see if you can throw a few dollars her way. If Jan is making it, it's guaranteed to make you smile.

Last but not least, if you just don't have any pocket money right now,  I still have something for you -- and that is Chuck Wendig's How You Die, a creepy Tumblr project full of whispered predictions of one's own demise. Fear and resignation mingled. This is, of course, in preparation for Chuck's forthcoming novel Blackbirds. Take a look at it, and then tell us how you're going to die, too.

Annnnd that's it for today. If you know of something else completely awesome going on right now, do feel free to talk about it in comments!

Changed and Changing

As you may recall, one of the reward levels for my Shiva's Mother Kickstarter was a bespoke short story. The deal was this: I'd write a short story of up to a thousand words per my backer's general requirements, and they'd be free to use it however made them happy. I was frankly astonished that any of them sold -- and in fact all four of them did, in the end.

The first of these stories I wrote is Changed And Changing, for Lucas J.W. Johnson's transmedia project Azrael's Stop -- he asked if I could play in his world for a little while, and I was of course delighted to do so. It was a bit of a stretch for me to write as I do precious little pure fantasy -- I was concerned the result if I tried would be a little trite -- but I am actually quite pleased with how it came out.

Now Lucas has put it out into the world for your entertainment. Thanks to Lucas for supporting my art and for sharing the result!

Please do read it and let me know what you think -- and then be sure to poke around Azrael's Stop a little more!