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Comment by ddingus | Hacker News Reader

I found it notable the "Ready Player One" movie, featured the group decision to close "The Oasis" on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

-->Because reality is real.

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That was the most annoying part of the movie for me.

The whole movie(and a book) was about using this amazing virtual world as the only escape from the shitty horrible reality. It wasn't just entertainment - people go to school there, people have friends there, for many it's the only source of happiness.

And that's what it was for the protagonist, he understands this better than anyone.

But the moment he becomes a billionaire and gets a hot girlfriend, he goes "reality is awesome guys, you should go out more!" While nothing has changed for most people. Fuck you, Wade!

It's like the dumbest cheapest way to add a "moral" to the movie, completely out of character, he'd never do something like this.

Iain M. Banks had a much more nuanced take on this in A Few Notes on the Culture [http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm] (free to read online), where his general point was that things like the Culture's drug glands should be taken as contraindicators by the government that they're messing up in reality and need to do better.

Ready Player One's problem as a movie/book is really that its not interested in exploring too much detail about how this world came to be, so you get fairly trite morals like that.

Like you could imagine a much longer epilogue where the protagonist uses his wealth to improve society, reduce poverty, advocate for governmental change, provide refuge for domestic abuse victims, and uses individual participation rates in the Oasis as a barometer for his success. Which wold be a real interesting moral for a mainstream movie to include.

It would, and that work you linked is new to me.

Thanks. Great, thought provoking read.

Haven't read the book, but the movie was disappointing for me, even as a Spielberg and overall shallow popcorn fun lover. It felt like a typical family movie which is for everybody who doesn't look for any cinematic quality, cheap moral statements forcefully inserted here & there.

Maybe I was not in a mood for it back then and should re-watch it, but the story really felt cheap and characters shallow.

It is.

I consider it a quick romp, and a bit forward looking, in terms of what rip, mix, burn sourced from more recent culture might look like.

Definitely need the right mood.

Agree - the entire movie made no sense. "The Oasis" would be one of many competing worlds, if it's worth trillions of dollars why wouldn't someone make a competitor? The challenges would have been solved in a day, the characters act like they see, feel and hear everything in VR but really the experience would never be the same as RL. Why would you wear a haptic suit if it can hurt you when you get punched?

None of it made any sense. But it had some references to back to the future and other "geek" stuff, so everyone loved it.

Great take! Yeah, that would be a very common sentiment.

Just the idea of the escape not really being one when the real suck so hard is all I was getting at. Two, odd day closures would prove to be no salve.

The link up thread, on "the culture" is new to me. Great read, and thought provoking. Worth the effort of this brief chat for sure.

I found that irritating. I mean, what if Tuesday and Thursday are my only days off?

Right?

As executed, it is irritating. And broken in ways several mentioned here up thread.

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