Ready Player One: Goodbye

Wow, I can't believe this is my last blog entry for an Ariel Ortiz class. One more semester and I'll be receiving my engineering degree. It has been quite a journey, but as everything, it all comes to an end. For this last post I'll  talk about a book that really caught me, Ready Player One. The plot is quite simple, it talks about a kid called Wade Watts, in a world were the actual "real world" is kind of a huge disaster for not saying other words, probably a dystopia (really similar to what we have seen in movies like The Hunger Games), but in the book there's also another world, a virtual one called the Oasis, were almost everyone from the real world plays it, because it was a whole new world, not only a videogame, in there people can have jobs, meet people, study in schools. Basically, they live more in the virtual than the reality itself. The creator of the Oasis was James Halliday, and I say was because in the book he is dead, and after his dead he created 3 easter eggs that, when a player has the three, that player will own the oasis, and be the richest person in the world, and that is the goal of our dear Wade Watts.

I got to be straight forward with you, at the beginning of the semester, I actually was not interested into reading the book because I have already watched the movie (yes, there is a movie and it is goooood), but as I started reading the lecture got me with details that aren’t shown in the movie and for instance, the author showed the problems of the real world quite well in the book but not in the movie, the problems are kind of the problems in Black Mirror (a Netflix series).

After reading this book, I probably developed a new way of thinking. Some of the problems presented in the story, aren’t that far away as we would expect. With the constant growth of technology innovations, we will need to improve the politics and laws, because is not only a matter of copyright and license terms anymore, is more of moral rights now, the interaction by the web is becoming stronger, so the possibility of creating a virtual world or anything will have to be attached to a restructure of the moral and ethical rights for anyone.