The Verge: Making a tie-in video game for Ready Player One fans seems like a maddening task.
After all, what does it mean to be a fan of Ready Player One, a piece of pop culture designed as a wrapper for other, often better pop culture? Does it mean being invested in the journey of digital treasure-hunter Wade Watts and his effort to protect the virtual reality world known as OASIS? Or is it more about enjoying its mashup of reference points, like DeLoreans, WarGames, and Rush?
2 comments:
For a book that is about being inside a video game, these VR experiences that they are making for it seem very disappointing. The fact that they were not given the rights to the movie franchise is extremely sad and ironic considering what the book is about and how cool it would be for the virtual reality experience to be about you as a new character assisting the main character in Ready Player One as he fights to save the world. There are so many cool ideas that could have been born from this book and brought into the virtual reality gaming sphere. In addition, there is a video game about the Walking Dead that is not VR but it gives you choices to make as you define the story line, and I hope that they make a version of that for Ready Player One because I personally think that it would be very fun and super cool to see and RPG version of Ready Player One.
One sentence that sticks out to me a lot is “, the designers apparently didn’t get the rights to all the movie and game franchises Spielberg did.” This sentence sticks out because it shows just how much power certain people in the entertainment industry hold. It shows a large amount of success someone must have to be trusted in the industry, which is both justified and sad. It is sad that these VR designers are so limited as I am sure that they are the top of their class and deserve the trust that Spielberg had with the rights. I understand that the people controlling the right don’t want to just give away writes willy nilly but sometimes I think that a huge risk could be worth it. I’m not an expert by any means in VR but I wonder if this will negatively affect other VRs that were based on books/movies. Hopefully, the limited rights are considered when other companies are selling rights so that better VR spin-offs can be developed, allowing for themed entertainment to blossom more.
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