Ready Player One (Comment)

After having read Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, I want to talk about the next two quotes:

Morrow wrote in his autobiography that he’d left GSS because ... he felt that the OASIS had evolved into something horrible. “It had become a self-imposed prison for humanity,” he wrote. “A pleasant place for the world to hide from its problems while human civilization slowly collapses, primarily due to neglect.” (p. 120)

and

(Halliday speaking) “I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn’t know how to connect with people there. I was afraid, for all of my life. Right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.” (p. 364)

These quotes are so captivating and I agree with both of them. If we think about nowadays (October 30, 2017), our OASIS is each one of the places where people try to escape from reality, this can be the internet, video games, or even your cellphone! Even that I love technology and the possibilities that can be done with the computational power, I still believe that true happiness can only be found in the reality. After having used many entertainment systems that might take you away form reality, the result is the same, When it finishes I at least find myself with the question "now what?". Should this platforms be infinite? No, I think the average human will get bored after sometime. 

There might be systems that take us from the reality that could have some virtues but there is too much "liberty" on this platforms which causes the people to do what they want without a severe repercution.

Our value system (personal and cultural values) may be affected/altered by a system like OASIS because people today go to the internet and read and post anything they think or like. For example, in Facebook people share news and stories that look real but they might have never happened. This starts to make people diverge from what really happened in reality. This will create an incorrect view of all that persons and might affect in many other branches. Also, people have different behaviors online and offline. This happens in Facebook but we have more than 1 social network, and what about game consoles and cellphones, tablets, laptops/computers? All of these are different "realities" that can resemble in some ways the real life which is similar as the OASIS. 

Ready Player fiction resembles the constructed reality that some other books like "The Hunger Games", "1984", "Narnia" have. I think that society will develop similar stuff as OASIS in the next 20 to 30 years. Envisioning a software architecture that could evolve to something like OASIS is something really possible by looking at the velocity on which the technology has evolved.

References:

Cline, E. (2011). "Ready Player One". Random House. 

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