The Game is the Thing

I watched Ready Player One three times within two weeks of its release. It’s not my all-time favorite movie, but I’d say it’s firmly in the top 20.Note: This post includes mild spoilers for Ready Player One. If you haven’t seen it yet...do that, then come back and read.

First, let me say that my commentary here references the movie alone. I’ve read, and enjoyed, the book but I really do think of them as separate things. Next, and to be clear, though the movie is a fun, engaging adventure with awesome effects and interesting characters, that’s not really the reason why it made my top 20.I’ve been professionally involved in some aspect of gaming for about three decades, since I was an enthusiastic 19-year-old kid. Programmer, software engineer, developer, project lead, independent creator, and a multi-role team member of a ground-breaking VR hardware/software company. And I was a gamer for almost 10 years before joining the ranks of the creators.

Phillips G7000 console and joystick controllers

Gaming has been the focal point of most of my professional life, and a large part of my personal entertainment since I was a kid and got my first gaming system, the Phillips G7000.

This story, this movie, was written for people like me – it’s an homage to the makers and the gamers – those who create new worlds to explore and conquer and those who enter those worlds to play the game.

Each piece of the story speaks to the partnership between creators and gamers and the ultimate purpose of the game – to escape reality for a bit, exist in a world with specific rules and mechanics you can learn and conquer, to have a puzzle you can solve, to have a place where you’re the hero, to have fun.

Ready, Player One

In good, engaging games, the player works their way through the layers and levels by learning the mechanics of the game – how the character moves, the style of the puzzles, the layout of the world. The gamer begins to understand how the creator thought and the rules he or she established as they created the world of the game. The gamer learns to decipher the clues the creator left, and develops a mutual conceptual language with the creator. Trust develops – trust that the creator was fair and the puzzle is solvable if the player works hard enough to understand the syntax and logic of the game world.

This story is grounded in that concept – it’s a celebration of the relationship between creators and their audience, of the mutual dependence that supports both, of the power, vitality, and ultimate simplicity of engaging with a great game right through to the meta moment. You get to the end of the puzzle, near the climax of the story, and there are the gamers, inside a game, playing an Atari heavy sixer on a cathode ray tube TV while standing in a virtual ice cave, on planet Doom, in a virtual world as virtual avatars. Their goal is to find the first easter egg ever made by a game creator - something a gamer could only do if they explored every inch of that simple, 8-bit world.

I’ve been both the kid thrilled by the find of that virtual secret prize and the creator laying breadcrumbs for others to follow so they could find my easter eggs.

No Risk, No Reward

Yes, the story has bad guys and some pretty pointed warnings about the down side of gaming too – what’s a good game without a challenge and a foe? It includes a strong indictment of those who want to subvert the gamer/creator relationship for greed and self-aggrandizement. There is, after all, a difference between engaging gamers and exploiting them – though we’ve all got to make money somehow. Part of the story is even a bit of a morality tale against the temptation to get lost in these virtual worlds to the exclusion of engaging in the real one.

The end of the adventure, the game’s victory screen, brings the whole thing neatly around. Halliday, the creator, sheds the digital skin of his avatar, Anorak, and appears as he was – a virtual, preserved memory of himself before he died with everything time, failure, mistakes, missed opportunities, and outrageous success had made of him. But there's a second memory of Halliday in the room too – a much younger version of him before any of that happened – a shy, 13-year-old kid just sitting, playing, enjoying the simple fun of a good game.

With Parzival standing between them, Halliday gives him the ultimate easter egg – the power to move from gamer to creator – and then says what every creator would like to say to every gamer who’s ever reached the end and won the prize, “Thanks for playing my game.”

Virtual Time Machine

Watching Ready Player One took me back to my first gaming job, and one of the first end-to-end games I ever created as a Software Engineer for Rare: Time Lord. The game play was judged pretty harshly and, in retrospect, the critics weren’t entirely wrong, but I was young and put way more focus on the aesthetic and engineering tech in the game to the point of neglecting some key play elements. I’m still disappointed I couldn’t, and didn’t, do more with it to this day (I’m cringing as I write about it).

Yet, I was, and still am, particularly proud of the intro – the music (written by David Wise) and the visuals of lightning crackling across the screen. These days there are programs that can create this kind of effect with little effort, but back then I had to program the x,y position of every pixel of lightning on every frame of the intro. It was time consuming and exacting work that only another creator or avid gamer could appreciate.

And yes, I hid an easter egg in the game. Rare didn’t know about it and Milton Bradley, the client for which the game was created, certainly didn’t. 26 years or so later, that easter egg is my proof, my virtual proof that Simon was there. It’s the bragging rights buried in my creation. As far as I know, no one’s ever found it, but I know it’s there and that’s what counts.

There are supposedly a few copies still out there – so if anyone is playing, here you go. If you pause the game when the master countdown clock hits May 15, and then tap out the tune to “Happy Birthday” on the keypad, the easter egg activates and gives you all of the character power-ups. It makes you invincible.

It took me considerable time to arrange the happy birthday tune data and tune-tapping-decoder-algorithm on the cartridge to make enough room for the easter egg – but it was worth it.

It's invisible graffiti – my virtual tag on the digital world I created: Once, long ago, Simon was here, trying to make the best game I could (at the time).

Because it’s Fun

In the end, what I like best about Ready Player One is it reminds me to reach back to the 13-year-old kid, giddy with my first gaming system, the 16-year-old in love with programming his BBC Micro, the 19-year-old thrilled with his first, real game developer job.

That time I got to meet Ernst Kline and sit in his Delorean…

It reminds me we’re supposed to be having fun while we’re creating these fantastical worlds – we’re supposed to be doing it so other people can have fun.

Sometimes I’ve gotten lost, or bogged down, in the IOI world of petty competition and exploitative pursuit of profit. That element will always be part of the business of gaming, and it will be in the virtual worlds we build the same as it is in the real world.

This story reminds me to keep the fun centered, to make it a focus because that’s why any of us is here, right? To play the game, to have fun, to be part of something, to be alive.

And feel like a giddy kid again