When Ready Player One begins, the year is 2045 and the setting is the rural Columbus, Ohio projects known as the Stacks. Protagonist Wade Watts gets around from his aunt’s gloomy trailer apartment to his sub-level mancave by sliding down poles/ropes and jumping on top of unstable platforms.

 

Watts, played by Tye Sheridan, warns in the opening narrative that, “these days it’s all bad around these parts… ever since the Corn Syrup Droughts, the Bandwidth Riots, everyone stopped trying to fix problems and are just trying to outlive them.” He adds that, “these days everyone is just looking for a way to escape.”

 

Steven Spielberg likes directing movies that are science fiction, where new worlds are built, and his orientation for his movies are focused toward it being both visual and temporal. In Ready Player One, 2045’s technologies are innovative. Where ever you look, you see the future: drones are delivering anything from pizza to haptic suit’s and massive video billboards are playing advertisements for the latest and greatest technologies.

 

In the Stacks, escape comes through the use of virtual reality headsets. In Ready Player, a person putting on a headset allows them to enter the “Oasis,” a metaverse of virtual experiences where people can indulge in anything. They can surf a 50-foot monster wave in Hawaii, ski the pyramids of Egypt, or even climb Mount Everest with Batman. Here, the limits of reality are “your own imagination.” You can do anything and go anywhere.

 

People go to the OASIS for all sorts of things that they can do, but they stay because of all the things they can be. They can customize their game image to be “tall, beautiful, scary, a different sex, a different species, or a live action cartoon.” In the Oasis it’s all your call for who you want to be. It’s also where people meet each other. It’s where people can make friends.

 

Things take a turn in the Oasis though. The creator of the Oasis, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), planned a carefully thought out Easter-egg hunt before his death hiding three keys that unlock the new ownership of the Oasis. In other words, the first person to find all three keys inherits the trillion-dollar Oasis. These keys are found at the end gate of three hidden challenges that test/reveal worthy traits of the future owner.

 

The quest has been ongoing for five years, with “gunters” (egghunters) racing to complete the challenge along with IOI - the second largest company in the world with designs on becoming the first by taking over the Oasis. The thing is though no one has even gotten one key. The Oasis may be free for now, but it won’t be if the head of IOI - Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn) gets his squad, “The Sixers,” to win the challenges and get all three keys. IOI invests all of their resources into winning Hallidays contest.

 

Wade Watts known as Parzival in the game, is one of those free player gunters. He spent his whole life learning about Halliday’s life in hopes of deciphering the clues to getting the keys. As the movie progresses, Parzival cracks the egg codes and is followed by IOS and the rest of the free-gamers.

 

The movie concludes with a massive war with Parcival leading the world of free gamers against Ios and the Sixers in a thrilling reality-based war. In the end, the evil IOS loses the war and Parzival divides the ownership of the Oasis among a group of free-gaming friends.