Its finally here, the latest movie by legendary film director Steven Spielberg. After watching the movie, it wasn't thankfully as bad as I was fearing. Alas, neither was it Spielberg's vaunted return to form. This post will be about at least some of the opportunities the movie could have taken to elevate it from its current iteration.
I . Worldbuilding
The movie takes place in the year 2045. Prior events turned things to hit rock bottom that it forced people to look to the OASIS for escape. Was the state of the world so terrible that no one had the means to rebuild? Was no country spared that it was impossible to pull off a Marshall Plan equivalent? Where governments failed, was there no organization led by a visionary leader who used this as an opportunity to uplift the masses? (I'll talk more about this possibility in a latter part of this post).
While modern living has most people on social networks or binging away on some entertainment medium, the world isn't as apathetic as how society is portrayed in the movie. Do schools still exist in this timeline? Did people got so bored that no one wanted to be a gamer-changer in reality, to reach for the stars?
Our protagonist Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) lives in Columbus, Ohio. His neighborhood ("The Stacks") is a slum area of trailers made like a Roman insula. Despite the rundown conditions, almost every one can afford a VR headset. How? It was like as if the downtrodden can get their hands on the latest iPhone or Galaxy S smartphone. While there was a scene where we see Wade buying a new VR suit in the Oasis, it wasn't clarified if one can buy VR headsets with just in-game credits. Are VR devices so cheap that only the rich have traditional gaming computers or consoles?
II. James Halliday and Gregarious Games
In the movie, the man responsible for the OASIS is James Halliday (Mark Rylance). It's implied that he has a bigger cult following than Steve Jobs ever had, with people crying when he died and Wade calling him a "god". While gaming has it share of fandoms, most people in the real world don't outright admire the creators of consoles like the Xbox or Playstation in this manner. On top of this, scenes with Halliday on screen doesn't reinforce this perception, as he doesn't display Steve Jobs' charisma.
Since Halliday created the OASIS, his company, Gregarious Games, became the largest company in the world. The OASIS was such a hit that Halliday gave 500 billion as part of the reward for his Easter egg hunt. Despite this, its never shown that either Halliday or his company were doing the world any favors besides bringing people the preeminent form of entertainment. With that money, Halliday could have engaged in effective altruism - funding "scientific projects, companies, and policy initiatives which can be estimated to save lives, help people." If this was established in the movie prior to his death bed announcement, it would have added more weight to the notion that Halliday touched people's lives that it caused them to break down in tears during his death.
The Easter egg hunt he places in the OASIS feels like a glorified trivia quiz on how well players know him rather than a test of skill that doesn't require someone to know obscure Halliday minutiae. And this is a surprise as Spielberg made the definitive adventure film series.
III. Heroes and villains
I'll have to break this section into 3 subcategories.
A) The Squad
Essential to the success of Wade's mission to save the OASIS are his friends - Aech (Lena Waithe), Daito (Win Morisaki), and Sho (Philip Zhao). Joining them is the fabled Art3mis (Olivia Cooke). But among this cadre of heroes, its only Art3mis who gets a back story. The death of her father at the hands of Innovative Online Industries (IOI) gives the audience some sympathy to her plight and motivations. She would also sacrifice herself in reality to ensure Wade escapes the clutches of IOI while she gets captured. Despite this setback, she would (with outside help) manage to infiltrate key areas of IOI's headquarters and provide valuable intel and further aid to Wade's quest while behind enemy lines.
The rest of the team, well there isn't much to say... if any. The youngest team member kept on pointing out he's eleven years old, and little else. For a movie longer than Temple of Doom, somehow this kid has less personality than Short Round. Aech is supposedly Wade's best friend in the OASIS, yet we barely get to know her and is effectively sidelined to make way for Art3mis. From the first race sequence to The Shinning homage, the movie is the Parzival and Art3mis show. We never even get a scene with the others where they reminisce how they met with Wade or the good times they had in the OASIS. It would have given them backgrounds and helped their character development.
B) The Opponents
The big bad is IOI, whose CEO is Nolan Sorrento. Now before getting into his character, I want to point out that while Ben Mendelsohn did a decent job with the material he was given, I feel ever since The Dark Knight Rises he's been typecast into playing the head of some organization destined to fail in the face of the heroic good guys. If he's going to play a major character in another blockbuster film soon, I hope he doesn't get into that doomed executive role again. Anyway, going back to the movie. Nolan Sorrento is, for all intents and purposes, a mustache twirling villain. He wants to win to gain ownership of the OASIS and do something evil with it. What exactly, we don't know really. We never know his motivations outside of "I'm the villain." Also he leaves his password out in the open in his office, reminding me of President Skroob from Spaceballs whose password for his luggage is 12345! More on him in later part.
His henchmen are no better. i-R0k (T.J. Miller) gives a level 99 magic orb that projected an energy shield on the third key's location and looks like Dr. Doom. And there's a female character who reminded me of Niander Wallace's replicant enforcer from Blade Runner 2049.
Despite being the second largest company in the world, its never revealed in the movie why would IOI partake in the Easter egg hunt. Why not just simply hack the servers?
C) The Protagonist
Despite being the star of the show, Wade Watts doesn't have much going for him. At the start of the movie, we see him going from his home to his hideout where he keeps his VR gear. During that sequence, there's a look of indifference with his surroundings. The movie might as well have started with a panoramic shot of The Stacks and cut right away to Wade gearing up for his play session. In Back to the Future, we get to see Marty McFly outside of Doc Brown's lab. In Ready Player One, its barely shown to the audience what Wade does in the real world. Outside of him living with his aunt who has various boyfriends move in and out, it ain't established if he has a job or if he dropped out of school, and so on. Speaking of his aunt, the movie unintentionally makes him less sympathetic when he doesn't talk about her after she gets blown up during an IOI attack on their home. Wade speaks of being named after someone's alter ego like Peter Parker, yet his aunt's death doesn't seem to motivate or impact him in a fashion similar to Ben Parker or Thomas and Martha Wayne's deaths were for Spiderman and Batman. And the reason why he joins the Easter egg hunt is because he's the biggest Halliday geek out there. When asked what he would do when he wins, Wade replies he wants to live in a big mansion. While its understandable why someone living in a slum would say such, he could have at least said he wanted to also donate to schools so kids can create better games or kickstart some promising game projects. It felt odd that despite his username being Parzival, his avatar is fitting for a Final Fantasy character.
IV. The State of the Gaming Industry
In spite of the above shortcomings, I feel that Ready Player One's biggest missed opportunity was how it failed to capitalize on the state of AAA video game industry and use it to its advantage.
First off, the movie poster was a representation of what was to come. While I like the final version as it evokes Drew Struzan's style, it wasn't gamey enough. The picture at the start of this post is a mockup I made in GIMP just to convey an idea what the poster should have been - a parody of most game box covers.
While the movie uses a myriad of pop-culture characters in a video game (and there are so many that it got distracting), its little more than window-dressing. The first 3 minutes of Red Letter Media's Rogue One review is a hilarious summary of why geeks like myself would probably go nuts during the movie and give it a free pass. For a movie that revels in its references, there was not a single nod to what was arguably the biggest game story in recent years.
For those who were out of the loop, 2017 was the year when video games made mainstream headlines due to a controversy caused by little known game called Star Wars Battlefront II, published by Electronic Arts (EA). Long story short, EA became too greedy by making Battlefront II an online casino, prompting concerned Star Wars fans and gamers alike to rise up in an online revolt. So loud was the noise that news outlets such as CNN and The Washington Post took notice. Even government authorities got into investigating the root of the controversy. Because of these, EA's suffered a drop of $3 billion in stock value by the end of November 2017, and had to overhaul the game's progression system. Now for those who have been gaming for years, this was merely the latest and most notable entry in a long list of misdeeds that EA and the rest of the AAA gaming industry has inflicted during the past decade or two.
The AAA video game industry has changed dramatically in a span of less than 2 decades.
When I started gaming, I had the base game and an expansion pack. When I was in high school, DLC, pre-order bonuses, gaming passes started to infect my games. After graduating college, there were now lootboxes and in-game currencies that usually don't go on sale. The so called Mona Lisa meme is a simple but effective summation of this change in the industry.
On May 31, 2017 during the Cowen and Company 45th Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, the CEO of Take Two Interactive said:
We are convinced that we are probably from an industry view undermonetising on a per-user basis.... There is wood to chop because I think we can do more...For an industry that in 2017 generated $108.4 billion in revenue, "undermonetising" is a real understatement. As a comparison, the film industry generated around $38-40 billion in revenue in the same year. There are claims that games are getting too expensive to make. So how can Hollywood studios make movies with an all star cast and lots of special effects every year yet still remain afloat despite earning $60 billion less than the game industry? Free to play games such as League of Legends can somehow earn more revenue than Star Wars: The Force Awakens (the former earned an astonishing $2.1 billion in 2017 alone).
Despite the amount of dough the industry has generated, the unparalleled avarice of game publishers knows (almost) no limits. In better days gone by, buying a complete edition meant you are getting the base game and all additional content. Now, even if you pay full price for a "gold" or "complete" edition, several games nowadays will have content that will not be included in that package. Rainbow Six Siege for example has a "complete" edition, but you'll have to fork out more cash if you want to get Assassin's Creed, The Division, Watch_Dogs skins for just one operator. Back in the old days, to get more in-game credits one had to just punch in a cheat code. Nowadays, you'll have to hand over your credit card information. What were once in-game rewards that can be earned through game play are now either DLC, microtransactions, or hidden away in a lootbox. We even got Konami charging save slots in Metal Gear Survive, and Bethesda using players to create paid mods in the guise of its "Creation Club". Its not enough for game publishers to earn a profit - they want all the money they can get short of murder.
I was hoping Ready Player One would shed some light behind the thinking of people like Bobby Kotick, Strauss Zelnick, Andrew Wilson, and their contemptuous ilk. But what the movie has taught me is that such people have motivations virtually identical to Mr. Krabs or Scrooge McDuck.
It probably wouldn't be so bad if there weren't other issues plaguing the industry that didn't directly involve money. A key element to the success of video games today are the marketing teams of the publishers. They create publicity and generate hype very well... perhaps a bit too well that false advertising has become a fact of life as a gamer. The war against piracy that publishers have waged has resulted in anti-piracy "solutions" that only harm bona fide customers. From online passes, to SecuRom (the thing that gave a limited number of times you can install the game before you have to buy a new copy), to Ubisoft's infamous always online requirement for games like Assassin's Creed II on PC. With increasingly faster internet speeds being offered and platforms such as Steam, game publishers are using this fact as a crutch to release products with more bugs and larger patches than ever before. The term "early access" encompasses not just games that officially have that label, even supposedly finished products made with the backing of multi-billion companies. Games that are annual releases and have mostly recycled content from the previous installment. Then there are bizarre partnerships to promote games. The stand out ones for me involve Doritos, Mountain Dew, Red Bull, and Totinos pizza rolls.
V. Making the movie relevant
Now that we have that little summary in Part IV on the current state of gaming today, here's one way Ready Player One could have applied these facts into the story.
The movie didn't need to be set in 2045 amidst a post apocalyptic world. With how fast technology has progressed, it could have taken place in 2025. The movie could have made Wade Watts as a kid born in the 1990s, old enough to experience firsthand those good old days of gaming where we got complete, innovative titles such as Medal of Honor and Halo: Combat Evolved. Then we get to see how he met Aech, Daito, and Sho. Perhaps they meet in a game like World of Warcraft or during a Battlefield match. Have a montage of the the group growing up, going through the various gaming generations. Meanwhile, Gregarious Games seeks to crowdfund through sites like Kickstarter their new game, an ambitious massively multiplayer online simulation game. Eventually James Halliday and Ogden Morrow unveil the OASIS in an E3 presentation that gets hyped like Destiny or No Man's Sky. The OASIS gets released, but like virtually every major game has major technical issues and falls short of the hype. Wade and his friends were among those that Kickstarted or pre-ordered the game, but are willing to put up with the game's bugs and limitations. Players like them are rewarded when the OASIS gets past its technical deficiencies and has additional content. Skins, items, or anything that would be a microtransaction are made for free. The OASIS gets expansion packs the size of most full priced AAA games. On top of that, players can mod things into the OASIS, causing it to gain content from every corner of pop-culture. Because of this, perhaps Wade could have used this as an opportunity to create great mods that cause people to take notice of his online persona, Parzival.
Then Halliday dies, triggering the Easter egg hunt he placed in the OASIS. This causes IOI to step in with their plans to control the OASIS. Nolan Sorrento, the CEO of IOI, is an old fashioned entrepreneur who has the adventurous and humanitarian spirit of Sir Richard Branson, but with a Machiavellian attitude. Surrounded by yes-men, he's blissfully unaware of the poor working conditions down at the base levels of his company. He wants to uplift humanity out of its current state, and sees the OASIS creating - in the words of Vox's Alissa Wilkinson - "a world of people so distracted by their shiny technology that they have entirely neglected the stuff of human life. They’d rather just escape into another world, created by a couple of programmers." He feels that the OASIS is an impediment to human advancement, making society lethargic and stagnant. The solution for him is to take control of the OASIS, then apply the tactics used by game publishers of old. Monetize the OASIS in various forms. Force players of grind up to 40 hours to earn free in-game currency, or pay $20 to unlock instantly a pink Darth Vader. Allow XP and level booster packs that instantly give players a faster level up rate or skip to level 99. Give players with enough cash pay to win gear that grant unfair advantages to them. Ban modding in the OASIS or force all content creators to make paid mods. The reason behind such practices? Sorrento can rationalize that he wants to make the OASIS into a chore so unbearable and lackluster that it will force its player base to "plunge back into the real world and resolve to change it" while simultaneously raking a huge profit that he will donate to philanthropic causes such as efforts to cure cancer, environmental groups, and space exploration.
IOI's plans to take over the OASIS are leaked across the web. The message spreads like wildfire thanks to the efforts of notable gamers in the vein of Angry Joe or Jim Sterling. Having seen firsthand how corporations such as EA, Activision, and Ubisoft changed their hobby over the years, Wade and his friends join the hunt to prevent this hostile takeover. Art3mis eventually gets to join them, with her backstory intact. Then the hunt ensues, except the challenges aren't reliant on Halliday trivia.
When Wade finally solves the final clue, Halliday appears, giving his message that "spending so much time in the virtual world is unhealthy", except with an additional warning that "The items and loot you've earned, end up owning you." Once he gains ownership of the OASIS, he donates half of the money to charity, while 45% goes to support promising game projects, 4% goes to maintaining the OASIS and free content, and the 1% he keeps for himself. He goes supporting efforts to encourage people to be less addicted to the OASIS.
VI. Conclusion
While James Cameron directed Titanic, my favorite childhood film, it was Steven Spielberg who made me fall in love with cinema. Among my favorite films in my personal collection are...
- Jaws
- Raiders of the Lost Ark
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
- Empire of the Sun
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
- Jurassic Park
- Schindler's List
- The Lost World: Jurassic Park
- Saving Private Ryan
- Minority Report
- Munich
- The Adventures of Tintin
- Lincoln
