Open Forum: What Did You Think of Spielberg's Ready Player One And Will It Change the Future of Virtual Worlds?

Ironically I've been too busy preparing for a VR event for a book about the founding of VR to write a review of the widely-anticipated movie based on  a book about the future of VR. (Coming soon-ish!) But if you've already seen Spielberg's Ready Player One, I'd love your take -- bonus points for opinions on how it might change the future of virtual worlds and social VR. I.E. Do you think the many millions who see the movie will be more inclined to check out one of the many real life attempts to build the OASIS?

Comments

[Adam]

** MILD SPOILERS WARNING **

It was pretty - and my god, the licensing department there must have been in overdrive with the sheer number of trademarked/copyrighted cameos from every major IP in the past 40 years. (Kudos to the team who worked on that, it'd have been painful!)

But, I thought it was not really exhibiting a virtual world - more like a giant MMORPG. Nothing in it really showed users creating new content, only the barest glimpses of anything but action gaming were shown; and written throughout was a bit of a moralising and pithy anti-escapism message, hammered home through the concluding monologue.

I liked the movie overall, it's fun, and has plenty of explosions - but it's not about a virtual world, not really; and if you go in expecting that, you'll probably be disappointed.

[JohnC]

As Adam said, those who live in virtual worlds (Feek The headset) will find nothing here. It is a movie produced by someone who has not spent many years living in a virtual world, pretending that they have the faintest idea of what that might be like. So they imagine it like the typical shoot to kill game that dominates the game markets these days. It is just another pretty movie, it will change nothing at all. The funny thing is, I can quite imagine the future of virtual worlds like this. What hideous mess. glad I will be long dead by then.

[rogert]

The movie was terrible on so many fronts.

First, it's about as shallow and soulless a movie can get. I've seen far better VR movies from 7-10 years ago that had far more depth and poetry to it then this one.
Secondly, the sad, pitiful theme of the film is that reality sucks in the future for everyone except the white guy and his friends who get half a trillion dollars and find love at the end. Reality still sucks for everyone else.
Thirdly, I was surprised that Speilberg made such an anti-democracy movie considering he did Lincoln and The Post. RP1 envisions a future where unelected people call all the shots and the fantasy is that we are all somehow 'saved' if we just trust a group of kids to manage it. Can anybody say Zuckerberg?
Lastly, the movie will do nothing for the VR corporate sellers because it will greatly disappoint new people to VR when they find that current technology doesn't even come close to the movie's visual quality.

The film does a disservice to all things VR mostly because Spielberg (who doeesn't write his films, allowed himself to look like somebody who just discovered VR and suddenly struck upon the profound thought that "reality is better"....when you get a trillion dollars and the girl, of course.

8 thumbs down

[rogert]

A good example of how illogical and silly this film is:

At the end, the bad guy takes out a small pistol, walks towards the "hero", in what seemed to be forever, through a huge crowd of threadbare hillbillies in a slum in Ohio, and they all move out of his way.

The whole time I'm thinking, "What??!! NOBODY IN A SLUM IN OHIO HAS A WEAPON TO SHOOT THIS BAD GUY!??!

I can't believe how lazy the logic in this film is.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Every review I've seen has described it as a plotless nod to 1980s nostalgia as seen through the eyes of a Male Gen-Xer Colonizer.

So I've not bothered to see it.

I think it will have very little impact on anything. The 80s was 28-38 years ago...

This is basically like when our parents were putting out movies about Woodstock or Forest Gump running across the USA while listening to 60s music as they got older...

It's a nod to getting old. That's all.

[Huckleberry Hax]

I thought it was okay - and not a great deal more than that. It introduced a few nice ideas (“You come for what you can do; you stay for who you can be”), but very much in passing. Obviously, I would have liked for these threads to have been pulled on a little harder. I would also have preferred to see a virtual world portrayed that was less of an escape from the real world and more one that complimented it. And I was disappointed that VR's application beyond just being a game was largely unexplored. Ultimately, though, it was a mainstream action film with limited minutes to tell its (fairly pedestrian) story - and there's only so much that we can expect from such a thing these days. If it does well then it might yet be the flame that lights the touch paper on a more in-depth exploration of VR within the mainstream media. What we need is a TV series, since that's where all of the serious thinking seems to be done right now.

[Cindy Bolero]

Instead of shunning the movie because its not like your virtual world, look at how people will start to "get it" and sooner more will join us. And virtual worlds will rise again, the economies will start to flourish again, and the planet could get greener with less carbon footprint because of it. Log in to socialize, log in to work, log in to school. Cut down on the use of fossil fuels to get around do things. Ive been doing it for years. Since Ive been an avatar, I am in my car 50% less than 10 years ago.

I'm with Adam, the RPO movie was pretty! And although the movie left a lot of things out from the book, I think it touched well on how people are about knowing each other as avatars and then meeting them in real life. That was a very important area to touch on for those of us that are evangelists that are often introducing VWs to new users. We deal with it all the time as avatars. We've all had avatar friends and coworkers for years that we will never meet in person, and some we have. I have an avatar friend upon our first meet in RL, he dropped to the ground, pink and blue beanbags as pose balls before we hugged.

Being an Atari alumni from the early 80s, the book and the movie was a trip down Memory Lane. But in general it sounded like a number of my VR and gamer buddies who talk about current or nostalgic games and movies all day. It also reminds me of those early personal webpages where people would list their favorite movies and their album/CD collection. One interesting thin though, some game enthusiasts have reminisced to me about early VCS game titles, as if they were a best friend in their childhood. They don't look at the early games as old school. They honor them.

With that, I can see how RPO is such a big deal. As an experienced avatar, it was nice to see what Rosedale had said Secondlife would look like by 2013. A quote from his keynote speech the Tech Museum in 2008: "In 5 years, Secondlife will look like Hollywood CG" - Well we know how that's all slowly coming to fruition. "We're gonna need a bigger boat" and many of us have moved on to create and play in pro game engine virtual worlds. My preference is Unity3D-based Sine.Space (mainly for the white labeling/rebranding capability), but they are all good.

Prior to the RPO movie release, I forecasted that there would be a hundred VR startups going after the education market because the book emphasized that Wade and his generation went to school in the Oasis. And of course all these VR startups would think that they are the first to do education in VR, like most other VR startups thinking they are inventing what we have been doing in virtual worlds for at least 15 years. But the movie didn't touch on that all. It showed kids in a conventional classroom. Which is good. Less competition for the virtual worlds education sector that actually knows HOW to do it because of their years of experience.

So I say “Thumbs Up” for the RPO movie, even though I agree with many of the comments in this thread, It is PR and Marketing for virtual worlds and its capabilities. Millions of people that have never been an avatar, are flocking to see RPO. That can only be a good thing for thousands of virtual world content creators and lonely avatars that could use more friends to interact with.

[PerYourHealth]

Prior to the RPO movie release, I forecasted that there would be a hundred VR startups going after the education market because the book emphasized that Wade and his generation went to school in the Oasis. And of course all these VR startups would think that they are the first to do education in VR, like most other VR startups thinking they are inventing what we have been doing in virtual worlds for at least 15 years. But the movie didn't touch on that all. It showed kids in a conventional classroom. Which is good. Less competition for the virtual worlds education sector that actually knows HOW to do it because of their years of experience.

[MyMorri]

I really appreciated this piece. I often think of how much of a time suck and a mental drain diving into comment conversations can be. But sometimes it is worth it. At the end of the day, it's important to assert oneself and to attempt to have discussions about what matters to you.