Ready Player One Independent Reading Reflection
By Max Bressler
In Ready Player One, Wade has several friends that he met online through the OASIS. In the OASIS, almost everybody does everything they can possibly do to keep their identities secure so nobody can see who they really are. Wade does this as well. That’s true in real life as well, to a lesser extent though. Towards the end of the book, Wade has to team up with one of Wade’s closest friends, whom he met in the OASIS. Through the entire friendship, Wade was led to believe that Aech (Wade’s friend) was a white teenager who was a heterosexual. However, when he met Aech, he found out that she was really an African American female who was a homosexual. While, again, these situations are far likely to a lesser extent in real life, situations happen very frequently. There are also exigencies where kids are put into serious danger when they give out their address or identity, shown several times by shows like Dateline. Another situation similar to this happens earlier in the novel when one of Wade’s acquaintances turns out to be a recluse, which Wade had no way of knowing seeing as this person only showed the part of him that he wanted to show, which was a far more confident person. Similarly, I am in the same boat as that person. That is not to say I am two faced, however, I am a lot more talkative and open about things while I’m on my computer playing games than I am at school or in social gatherings.
In Ready Player One, one of the reasons that everybody keeps their true identities hidden is because if their identity gets out into the open, you have a high probability of being in danger. This is shown several times throughout the book. One of those occasions is when Wade is in a life or death situation. He could either join the evil corporation, IOI, or let his abusive family die. He chooses the latter, not realizing that they had set up an explosive at his home. While these situations are probably almost never happen, there are cases similar to this occurrence. A lot of these cases are due to the deep web. Unfortunately, if you make the terrible decision to go on this service, you could end up dying. Because there are some truly awful people on there, their lack of empathy could lead them to hack you to figure out your personal information which could lead you to be sold into human trafficking or something along those lines. Another case similar to this in Ready Player One is when Daito, an acquaintance of Wade’s, is killed because he is close to finding the virtual treasure that he was searching for. This is of course caused by IOI, who also attempted to kill Wade earlier in the novel.
