The premise of NPCs is not terribly original: what if when people stopped playing, the world of the D&D-like game kept moving, and the characters who aren’t actually players have independent existences. I feel like I’ve seen this sort of thing before, but at the same time, here it was still somewhat entertaining. This is not highly literary fiction one reads for the sake of being able to say one has read it; this is the kind of thing you read when you want something […]
The Happiest Dystopia
I was born and grew up in the 1980s. I was not a gamer, and was not much into pop culture. Even so, I had a lot of fun with Ready Player One. Set 18 years from now, the world is basically lived in a virtual setting known as OASIS. When the company founder, James Halliday, dies, he leaves a challenge, basically a treasure hunt through OASIS based on 80s trivia (the era of his youth). Naturally a culture of studying everything 80s from the […]