As an author and gamer, and active in VR this article details an important matter of affairs. One conveying the plausibility of sustainability itself, and that emphasized in how writers shape our worldview.
In the novel Ready Player One, in one of the final scenes the script reads;
“I created the oasis because I never felt at home in the real world. I never connected with the people there. I was afraid for all of my life, right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only you place can find true happiness, because reality is real.“
James Halladay
In the movie of the same, the altered script is said as so;
“… I realized as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place you can get a decent meal.“
James Halladay
The alteration of the narrative downplays the idea that the internet and VR can’t provide true happiness for the user, and however well immersed the real person may be. The new narrative alternatively demonstrates that real world sustenance in good meals is actually what the internet and VR doesn’t provide to its avatars, who in this manner cannot be compared at all in fact to real people. Indeed the pretense that artificial happiness is within a hierarchy and less than the real kind or worse somehow was rejected by the Hollywood production team led by famed director Stephen Spielberg.
As the audience, how our worldview is shaped by writers and how subsequent reviewers, producers and script editors accept this, is the most influential matter of publication, media and science.
At this climax of Halladay’s ‘gamified’ inheritance, as an audience we understand why things are happening and how similar events may happen to us all, which necessarily creates our worldview. When you consider the change and substance involved in the RP1 narrative, the alteration to the script makes a clear and forward demonstration for all on the appropriation of narratives for public awareness itself. Where a perhaps lonely author will convey the superiority of the human emotional make-up, but the corporate agenda consigns such ignorance to the hungry and needy. By this Cline’s enforced support for gamers in RP1 is actually removed, where us gamers will be stronger and surer in the real world on a scale which impacts much more than the duration of good sustenance that a good meal creates. Indeed a happiness which transcends one’s lifetime is the point which Cline was denied in provisioning public acceptance of this virtual reality-scape.
As a sole change in the narrative of RP1 it’s immense even still when considering the complex socio-political changes undertaken by the adaptation to the original script. Since, because it’s a modification of the worldview, that of the genius behind the production of the greatest industrial technological innovation conceivable must be regarded for debate. That the motivation and temperament of Halladay would be modified too is indicative to all programmers, gamers, and producers anywhere that chips are manufactured, or any place also that metal is mined. The entirety of the global commercial enterprise is stifled indeed when you consider that the happiness we know as human-beings has actually been trumped by a new and superior artificial reality contained happiness. An artificial reality where true happiness does reside, but just not good meals.
Now one might say, that’s BS, I can have a good meal in the real world and the best pleasures only in an albeit fake replica of the real world.
Surely you can tear yourself away from your immersion. But someone makes those meals you’re eating, and with the very best of all history at their fingertips, adapted, and learned over a long enduring course of professional specialization, and by not some wizz-bang command. The legacy of the power and pleasures in true civilization has a price tag, known simply in the fine dining experience here and with ample selections of cuisines, but radically as the agenda of conformity to the clock, to schools, and through professionalism. The gamer, no, but the programmer can stop anything to obtain a succulent meal delivered right to them within an hour or less. So hang on, surely any gamer can pause the battle or run into a subset VR for breaking time in their virtual world, because sustaining their body, with fitness of their mind-body paramount, right?
What an advertisement this production outfit entails for life in general, with its epic battles where everyone online dies. Yet it isn’t a religious-political advertisement with Halladay’s in-screen recommendation for a cheeseburger whilst handing the silver (no golden) egg to Parzival. That is by breaking the most taboo of all biblical laws on mixing consumption of the mother and child in one hit i.e. beef and cheese together, which isn’t really popular… (trending sarcasm inserted).
The Sequel
Coming up upon the decisive second movie Ready Player Two, long now this sequel has been available at the bookshop, and perhaps the adaptive conciliated narrative by Ernest Cline is actually paramount for developing the public worldview. Has Cline taken on the mighty corporations after all with RP2? Is he a renegade libertarian, or only his star characters? Your take on this answer will depend on how you’ve experienced this ultimate side-hustle between Hollywood and it’s writers. Personally, the sequence I partook in is as follows; Movie of RP1 first, then novel of RP2, then novel of RP1, and both novels in audio-book format. Thus in approach to the meta-narrative from this exposure it’s been to justify the sequel in novel format by the movie experience. This is perhaps the hardest lot to take on, since being without Cline’s original contexts, but that altered version with the most equivocated corporate agendas in place as I will yet explain. Well, would we expect Cline to secretly act on corporate reforms as an alternative… I seriously doubt that. Yet, here I sound like Wade Watts after all.
Now in actual matter of facts the sequel RP2’s novel received a lot of negative reviews, an indication perhaps of a rejection of the worldview therein contained, or rather a rejection of Cline’s imagination, but only in favor of Spielberg. As gaming portrays worlds so commonly today, they still all have the same rules which just get stretched more or less. Yet, in this new cyber-world detailed in RP2, the body-less, virtual-world which permanently substitutes the physical senses for artificial senses… there be dragons! What is the pinnacle of the barrier between fantasy and science fiction if not whether something can actually be real, or in this case, a code just beyond any professional reality. Though limited in the most supreme measure by our common understanding of the scope and possibility for new kinds of senses, it’s ironic that gamers are finally rewarded in RP2 with a new world. That is, if you can ethically accept being adorned with the head apparatus for scanning and copying yourself into your new virtual reality.
The time is nigh for Hollywood to sell us on RP2’s New World, they’ve had over 400 years to prepare since Columbus trumped the Indians!
The RP2 narrative espouses the advanced scenario of a person being scanned without knowing it, and what that means for all involved. This narrative regards surveillance, and more specifically the appropriation of the most advanced kind of secret surveillance imaginable and what those privy too can achieve within another world separate to this entirely, there effectively thus out of the confines of ethical limitations, and free from the law. Can you see how that’s going to fly with Spielberg at all? Most probably like the boy who could, and his wondrous plastic spray gun.
J.S.Jowett's Master Blog 