Ethical Reflection on Ready Player One


Hi, today’s entry (and maybe the last one) is going to be a little different. It will be an ethical reflection about the course’s book called “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline.  This novel is about Wade Watts at some moment in the future with a complicated world situation. OASIS was developed by a programmer called James Halliday. Basically, any person could distract himself from the real world and hide or spend time inside this virtual one. This sounds like a normal game but it isn’t. Oasis included everything a person can do in the real world, from working and studying to practice hobbies and buying stuff, it is literally the same as the real world. Suddenly, James Halliday died but left a competition to win the whole control of his fortune, company, and Oasis. Obviously, Wade wins.
I want to mention that this book was pretty interesting for me and I think I can say it was one of the most entertaining and funny lectures I've ever had. This just because I’m really excited about what's coming soon thanks to technology. Are we going to soon have an Oasis experience?

I’m going to analyze some points about OASIS by answering some questions:
Here are two quotes from Ready Player One:

Morrow wrote in his autobiography that he’d left GSS because ... he felt that the OASIS had evolved into something horrible. “It had become a self-imposed prison for humanity,” he wrote. “A pleasant place for the world to hide from its problems while human civilization slowly collapses, primarily due to neglect.” (p. 120)

(Halliday speaking) “I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn’t know how to connect with 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 place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.” (p. 364)


  • ·      Do you agree with the two previous quotations?
Morrow and Halliday where the creators of OASIS and I can say that I kinda agree with the first one. Because, by using these types of games, you can effectively distract yourself or just hide from real life problems and I’m a true believer in that evading problems always ends up in a disaster or little by little consuming us. I think that we can’t just move from one real world to another virtual one in order to be happy. Despite the fact that it is ok and even ideal to distract ourselves from problems doing stuff we like, in this case, a VR game, it’s totally wrong to fully hide and ignore real-world problems, because at the end we are living in the real world, not in the virtual one.
  • Do you think that there are any similarities between the OASIS and the way we currently use IT technology (computers, game consoles, smartphones, etc.) and social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.)?

I think there are a lot of similarities between OASIS and our daily IT usage. Nowadays, a considerable part of our social interaction is via the technology and as in OASIS, human interaction its more virtual than real. In OASIS there are messages, emails, chat groups, and blog, things that we already have when using any social network, computer or smartphone.
We are living in a kind of real world combined or complemented with a virtual one. But in OASIS it’s like people really try hard to leave the real world and get a total life in virtual reality.

  • Do you think it’s possible, technologically speaking, to have something similar to the OASIS by the years 2040 or 2050?

I really believe that this is possible. We can look at many of the actual VR games out there, they are amazing, and it really makes you feel like if you where there. Also, there are already haptic suites to combine virtual reality viewing and listening, with feeling. And that totally empowers the experience. So, there are no hardware limitations, and if they are, in 30 years I’m sure they are going to be solved. A clear example are cellphones and computers, look how they evolved during the last 30 years, Its insane!
About software? I think there are no limitations, just a lot of work to do.

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