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• 1 2017-11-15T19:31:01-08:00 Ready Player One Formatting 19 Formatted Text plain 2017-12-05T14:03:23-08:00 Jieni Introduction

  This in a section that includes four types of formats of Ready Player One, XML link with footnotes, Copy of TXT file, Scanned copies of the physical pages, and Wordles created by Word Cloud to show word frequency. 

   

  1) XML link with footnotes: There are hyperlinks and footnotes in this XML link for some important words from the text.
  2) Copy of TXT file: Before each copy of TXT file, there is an introduction that finished by each group member to introduce her choice of pages, and critical analysis about it. (Notes by Lisa: Due to Scalar's framework the quoted text is a copy of the originally raw TXT Files which is not supported within Scalar framework.) 
  3) Scanned copies of the physical pages: This is the copy of the pages from a physical book. (Notes by Lisa: Originally PDF. These are in JPEG form since PDF is not supported. )
  4) Wordles created by Word Cloud to show word frequency: Wordles shows the frequency of words in each selection and all three selections.

  Ready Player One
  • XML link with footnotes
  • Copy of TXT file: Due to Scalar's framework the quoted text is a copy of the originally raw TXT Files which is not supported within Scalar framework.
  • Scanned copies of the physical pages, originally PDF. These are in JPEG form since PDF is not supported. 
  • Wordles created by Word Cloud to show word frequency.
  
  XML (Please see linked page)
  
  Ready Player One Page 14

  14: Ernest Cline

  hers, and the Millers occupied the large master bedroom at the end of the hall. There were six of them, and they paid the largest share of the rent. Our trailer wasn’t as crowded as some of the other units in the stacks. It was a double-wide. Plenty of room for everybody.

  I pulled out my laptop and powered it on. It was a bulky, heavy beast, almost ten years old. I’d found it in a trash bin behind the abandoned strip mall across the highway. I’d been able to coax it back to life by replacing its system memory and reloading the stone-age operating system. The processor was slower than a sloth by current standards, but it was fine for my needs. The laptop served as my portable research library, video arcade, and home theater system. Its hard drive was filled with old books, movies, TV show episodes, song files, and nearly every videogame made in the twentieth century.

  I booted up my emulator and selected Robotron: 2084, one of my all-time favorite games. I’d always loved its frenetic pace and brutal simplicity. Robotron was all about instinct and reflexes. Playing old videogames never failed to clear my mind and set me at ease. If I was feeling depressed or frustrated about my lot in life, all I had to do was tap the Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away as my mind focused itself on the relentless pixelated onslaught on the screen in front of me. There, inside the game’s two-dimensional universe, life was simple: It’s just you against the machine. Move with your left hand, shoot with your right, and try to stay alive as long as possible.

  I spent a few hours blasting through wave after wave of Brains, Spheroids, Quarks, and Hulks in my unending battle to Save the Last Human Family! But eventually my fingers started to cramp up and I began to lose my rhythm. When that happened at this level, things deteriorated quickly. I burned through all of my extra lives in a matter of minutes, and my two least-favorite words appeared on the screen: GAME OVER.

  I shut down the emulator and began to browse through my video files. Over the past five years, I’d downloaded every single movie, TV show, and cartoon mentioned in Anorak’s Almanac. I still hadn’t watched all of them yet, of course. That would probably take decades.

  I selected an episode of Family Ties, an ’80s sitcom about a middleclass family living in central Ohio. I’d downloaded the show because it had been one of Halliday’s favorites, and I figured there was a chance that some clue related to the Hunt might be hidden in one of the episodes. I’d

  ​Ready Player One Page 15

  Ready Player One: 15

  become addicted to the show immediately, and had now watched all 180 episodes, multiple times. I never seemed to get tired of them.

  Sitting alone in the dark, watching the show on my laptop, I always found myself imagining that I lived in that warm, well-lit house, and that those smiling, understanding people were my family. That there was nothing so wrong in the world that we couldn’t sort it out by the end of a single half-hour episode (or maybe a two-parter, if it was something really serious).

  My own home life had never even remotely resembled the one depicted in Family Ties, which was probably why I loved the show so much. I was the only child of two teenagers, both refugees who’d met in the stacks where I’d grown up. I don’t remember my father. When I was just a few months old, he was shot dead while looting a grocery store during a power blackout. The only thing I really knew about him was that he loved comic books. I’d found several old flash drives in a box of his things, containing complete runs of The Amazing Spider-Man, The X-Men, and Green Lantern. My mom once told me that my dad had given me an alliterative name, Wade Watts, because he thought it sounded like the secret identity of a superhero. Like Peter Parker or Clark Kent. Knowing that made me think he must have been a cool guy, despite how he’d died.

  My mother, Loretta, had raised me on her own. We’d lived in a small RV in another part of the stacks. She had two full-time OASIS jobs, one as a telemarketer, the other as an escort in an online brothel. She used to make me wear earplugs at night so I wouldn’t hear her in the next room, talking dirty to tricks in other time zones. But the earplugs didn’t work very well, so I would watch old movies instead, with the volume turned way up.

  I was introduced to the OASIS at an early age, because my mother used it as a virtual babysitter. As soon as I was old enough to wear a visor and a pair of haptic gloves, my mom helped me create my first OASIS avatar. Then she stuck me in a corner and went back to work, leaving me to explore an entirely new world, very different from the one I’d known up until then.

  From that moment on, I was more or less raised by the OASIS’s interactive educational programs, which any kid could access for free. I spent a big chunk of my childhood hanging out in a virtual-reality simulation of Sesame Street, singing songs with friendly Muppets and playing interactive games that taught me how to walk, talk, add, subtract, read, write, and share. Once I’d mastered those skills, it didn’t take me long to discover that the OASIS was also the world’s biggest public library, where

   

  ​Ready Player One Page 66

  66: Ernest Cline

  early adventure games, and each of those riddles had made sense in the context of its game. So I devoted an entire section of my grail diary to deciphering the Limerick, line by line.

  The Copper Key awaits explorers

  This line seemed pretty straightforward. No hidden meaning that I could detect.

  In a tomb filled with horrors.

  This line was trickier. Taken at face value, it seemed to say that the key was hidden in a tomb somewhere, one filled with horrifying stuff. But then, during the course of my research, I discovered an old Dungeons & Dragons supplement called Tomb of Horrors, which had been published in 1978. From the moment I saw the title, I was certain the second line of the Limerick was a reference to it. Halliday and Morrow had played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons all through high school, along with several other pen-and-paper role-playing games, like GURPS, Champions, Car Wars, and Rolemaster.

  Tomb of Horrors was a thin booklet called a “module.” It contained detailed maps and room-by-room descriptions of an underground labyrinth infested with undead monsters. D&D players could explore the labyrinth with their characters as the dungeon master read from the module and guided them through the story it contained, describing everything they saw and encountered along the way.

  As I learned more about how these early role-playing games worked, I realized that a D&D module was the primitive equivalent of a quest in the OASIS. And D&D characters were just like avatars. In a way, these old role-playing games had been the first virtual-reality simulations, created long before computers were powerful enough to do the job. In those days, if you wanted to escape to another world, you had to create it yourself, using your brain, some paper, pencils, dice, and a few rule books. This realization kind of blew my mind. It changed my whole perspective on the Hunt for Halliday’s Easter egg. From then on, I began to think of the Hunt as an elaborate D&D module. And Halliday was obviously the dungeon master, even if he was now controlling the game from beyond the grave.

  I found a digital copy of the sixty-seven-year-old Tomb of Horrors module buried deep in an ancient FTP archive. As I studied it, I began to develop a theory: Somewhere in the OASIS, Halliday had re-created the Tomb of Horrors, and he’d hidden the Copper Key inside it.

  I spent the next few months studying the module and memorizing all 

  ​Ready Player One Page 67

  Ready Player One: 67

  of its maps and room descriptions, in anticipation of the day I would finally figure out where it was located. But that was the rub: The Limerick didn’t appear to give any hint as to where Halliday had hidden the damn thing. The only clue seemed to be “you have much to learn if you hope to earn a place among the high scorers.”

  I recited those words over and over in my head until I wanted to howl in frustration. Much to learn. Yeah, OK, fine. I have much to learn about what?

  There were literally thousands of worlds in the OASIS, and Halliday could have hidden his re-creation of the Tomb of Horrors on any one of them. Searching every planet, one by one, would take forever. Even if I’d had the means to do so.

  A planet named Gygax in Sector Two seemed like the obvious place to start looking. Halliday had coded the planet himself, and he’d named it after Gary Gygax, one of the creators of Dungeons & Dragons and the author of the original Tomb of Horrors module. According to Gunterpedia (a gunter wiki), the planet Gygax was covered with re-creations of old D&D modules, but Tomb of Horrors was not one of them. There didn’t appear to be a re-creation of the tomb on any of the other D&D-themed worlds in the OASIS either. Gunters had turned all of those planets upside down and scoured every square inch of their surfaces. Had a re-creation of the Tomb of Horrors been hidden on one of them, it would have been found and logged long ago.

  So the tomb had to be hidden somewhere else. And I didn’t have the first clue where. But I told myself that if I just kept at it and continued doing research, I’d eventually learn what I needed to know to figure out the tomb’s hiding place. In fact, that was probably what Halliday meant by “you have much to learn if you hope to earn a place among the high scorers.”

  If any other gunters out there shared my interpretation of the Limerick, so far they’d been smart enough to keep quiet about it. I’d never seen any posts about the Tomb of Horrors on any gunter message boards. I realized, of course, that this might be because my theory about the old D&D module was completely lame and totally off base.

  So I’d continued to watch and read and listen and study, preparing for the day when I finally stumbled across the clue that would lead me to the Copper Key.

  And then it finally happened. Right while I was sitting there daydreaming in Latin class.

  
  ​Ready Player One Page 123

  Ready Player One: 123

  “No shit, you had a late night!” he said. “Look at you! How can you be so calm! Don’t you realize what this means? This is huge! This is beyond epic! I mean … congratu-freakin’-lations, man!” He began to bow repeatedly. “I am not worthy!”

  “Cut it out, OK? It’s really not a big deal. I haven’t actually won anything yet.…”

  “Not a big deal!” he cried. “Not. A. Big. Deal? Are you kidding me? You’re a legend now, man! You just became the first gunter in history to find the Copper Key! And clear the First Gate! You are a god, from this moment forth! Do you not realize this, fool?”

  “Seriously. Stop it. I’m already freaked out enough as it is.”

  “Have you seen the news? The whole world is freaking out! And the gunter boards are going apeshit! And everyone is talking about you, amigo.”

  “I know. Listen, I hope you’re not pissed at me for keeping you in the dark. I felt really weird about not returning your calls or telling you what I was up to.…”

  “Oh, come on!” He rolled his eyes dismissively. “You know damn well that if I’d been in your shoes, I would have done the same thing. That’s how the game is played. But”—his tone grew more serious—“I am curious to know how that Art3mis chick happened to find the Copper Key and clear the gate right after you did. Everyone seems to think you two were working together, but I know that’s horseshit. So what happened? Was she following you or something?”

  I shook my head. “No, she found the key’s hiding place before I did. Last month, she said. She just wasn’t able to obtain the key until now.” I was silent for a second. “I can’t really go into the details without, you know—”

  Aech held up both hands. “No worries. I totally understand. I wouldn’t want for you to accidentally drop any hints.” He flashed his trademark Cheshire grin, and his gleaming white teeth seemed to take up half of the vidfeed window. “Actually, I should let you know where I am right now.…”

  He adjusted his vidfeed’s virtual camera so that it pulled back from a tight shot of his face to a much wider shot that revealed where he was—standing next to the flat-topped hill, just outside the entrance to the Tomb of Horrors.

  Ready Player One Page 124

  124: Earnest Cline

  My jaw dropped. “How in the hell—?”

  “Well, when I saw your name all over the newsfeeds last night, it occurred to me that for as long as I’ve known you, you’ve never had the dough to do much traveling. Any traveling, really. So I figured that if you’d found the hiding place of the Copper Key, it probably had to be somewhere close to Ludus. Or maybe even on Ludus.”

  “Well done,” I said, and I meant it.

  “Not really. I spent hours racking my pea-sized brain before I finally thought to search the map of Ludus for the surface features described in the Tomb of Horrors module. But once I did, everything else clicked into place. And here I am.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Yeah, well, it was pretty easy once you pointed me in the right direction.” He glanced back over his shoulder at the tomb. “I’ve been searching for this place for years, and all this time it was within walking distance of my school! I feel like a total moron for not figuring it out on my own.”

  “You’re not a moron,” I said. “You deciphered the Limerick on your own, otherwise you wouldn’t even know about the Tomb of Horrors module, right?”

  “So, you’re not pissed?” he said. “That I took advantage of my inside info?”

  I shook my head. “No way. I would have done the same thing.”

  “Well, regardless, I owe you one. And I won’t forget it.”

  I nodded toward the tomb behind him. “Have you been inside yet?”

  “Yeah. I came back up here to call you, while I wait for the server to reset at midnight. The tomb is empty right now, because your friend, Art3mis, already blew through here earlier today.”

  “We’re not friends,” I said. “She just showed up, a few minutes after I got the key.”

  “Did you guys throw down?”

  “No. The tomb is a no-PvP zone.” I glanced at the time. “Looks like you’ve still got a few hours to kill before the reset.”

  “Yeah. I’ve been studying the original D and D module, trying to prepare myself,” he said. “Wanna give me any tips?”

  I grinned. “No. Not really.”

  “Didn’t think so.” He was silent for a few seconds. “Listen, I have to ask

   

  
  
  
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