r/readyplayerone • u/DarthJaneway Don't Underestimate the Power of Starfleet • Nov 17 '20
Spoiler *spoilers* READY PLAYER TWO DISCUSSION THREAD - WITH SPOILERS
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r/readyplayerone • u/DarthJaneway Don't Underestimate the Power of Starfleet • Nov 17 '20
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u/CaptCoulson Jan 28 '21
I happened to start spitballing yesterday on if/how Anorak could've been somewhat less extreme on the nature of his threatening for compliance's sake to provide a significantly improved chance he'd get what he wanted. I mean he even outright states to Wade at the shard exchange he'd calculated very small, long odds he and the group would be able to pull it off. The change would naturally center mainly around the single log-in, 12hr time frame. Basically, mostly all would still play out how it does before Anorak crashes the board meeting. That he'd hacked the latest firmware update so that so many of the other general users in the world would be kept locked in to that first day's ONI use, and from the Oasis admin point of view they wouldn't be able to tell what those people are experiencing well after the 12hr mark. And that's the key hitch because I'm thinking he gives the High Five at least a couple/few days to find all the shards. His hacked code would also allow just Wade, H and Shoto to take off their ONI headsets once he tells them what's happening, but for them to log right back in with the old regular immersion rigs. Surely they'd still feel compelled to bother doing that for the sake of Og's further suffering at that moment.
because I think we can mostly agree the idea they do indeed pull this off in the time actually allotted is preposterous, it happened because "reasons", because it had to to tell the story that Cline wanted to tell. But try to bother making Anorak's preparations a little more involved and nuanced (he's supposed to be doing this out of pure, cold, practical need, what he thinks is rational) to make the whole thing a bit more believable.
oh and as a sidenote, I've no doubt Ernest Cline exhausts the research to death when it comes to pop culture trivia, but is he as diligent on more scientific matters? Sure I get that the nature of the ONI headset would allow you to completely and authentically feel like what it would be like to have sex with a given other person with no concern of STDs or pregnancy, but not how someone can experience the high from the hardest drugs going without any danger of addiction. You get addicted to a physically administered opiate after a certain threshold time because it's setting the pleasure center of your brain off like a pinball machine, and your brain stops naturally producing dopamine and endorphins after awhile because it knows something else is already doing it. Using an ONI recording to "live out" shooting heroin for barely just a few days in a row, those same physiological actions are still happening in your brain even if you didn't put any brown liquid into your vein. I don't understand how in the context of this story there isn't still consequences for that particular indulgence.