The DeanBeat: What Ready Player Two tells us about the metaverse

I was a fanboy for Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One book and the 2018 Steven Spielberg movie based on it. And so when the sequel novel Ready Player Two came out in December, I was all over it. Critics panned it, and I understand this sequel isn’t as innovative as the first book. But amid the bleak reality of the pandemic, I enjoyed reading how Cline envisioned the evolution of technology and the eventual creation of the metaverse, or the Oasis, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected. It fascinates me to see how technology, games, and science fiction are all intertwined in a creative vortex that generates faster progress in each of these disciplines.

And next week, our own conference about the metaverse (you can sign up here) takes place, inspired by books like Cline’s as well as Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash and William Gibson’s 1984 book Neuromancer, which defined the metaverse-like experience as a “consensual hallucination.”