Virtual Identities and Realities in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One

Abstract

Ready Player One is a novel written by the author Ernest Cline, which represents an imaginary world in a dystopian future where the world suffers from a massive energy crises. It portrays an immersive game-obsessed world that fuses high-tech virtual reality with 1980s nostalgia. Characters in the novel escape their actual reality through worldwide gaming in the OASIS, a massively multiplayer Virtual Reality world that allows them to create their own desired identity and to live in their own desired world experiencing high fantasy, attend lavish parties, or simply socialize with friends. The novel, not only illustrates how individuals live two separate lives one in the actual world and another in a virtual world. Yet it also questions the line between reality and illusion. And this present study aims to shed light on the issues of what is real and what is an illusion and how identity is affected by living two different lives under two different identities.