Ready Player One Chapter Summaries

Ready Player One critiques our current society’s dependence on technology and mindless destruction of the atmosphere by blowing it up on a larger scale. Nowadays, it seems like everyone constantly has their face in some kind of device, including some young children. Usually we are using smartphones, tablets or other portable computers. In Ernest Cline’s dystopian society, a new virtual reality machine called the OASIS is used by nearly everyone for everything from playing video games, to education; even some major corporations have their headquarters in the virtual OASIS.
Throughout the first chapter of the book, we as readers learn all there is to know about how bad society has gotten by 2044. The main character, Wade Watts lives in a place called “The Stacks.” The Stacks gets its name from the way trailers are stacked on top of each other like apartments. As Wade describes on pages 20-22, “We lived in the Portland Avenue Stacks, a sprawling hive of discolored tin shoeboxes rusting on the
However, this doesn’t invalidate the fact that what goes on in the OASIS is meaningful to people; that the experiences lived there and the connections formed are very much real. Towards the end of Ready Player One, Wade must meet up with one of his OASIS friends while on the run, and what he sees surprises him, “A heavyset African American girl sat in the RV’s driver seat… Whatever anger or betrayal I felt quickly evaporated… ‘You’re my best friend, Aech. My only friend, to be honest,’” (319). Aech’s avatar in the OASIS was a caucasian male, so her real life body was the polar opposite of the person Wade had spent hours with. Yet, nevertheless, they are still best friends because it wasn’t the physical person they were friends with, but the personality of that