Ready Player One

For clarification, this is a blog post about the book entitled, Ready Player One, not an instruction to prepare :)

Ready Player One had a little bit of fame last year. There's a virtual world which becomes a de facto standard, most different games running under the same umbrella system, and also video-conferencing, most education, etc. Its creator dies, and leaves control of the company to whoever finds a secret object secreted somewhere in the virtual world.

Initially there's a massive publicity storm, but after several years, people start to assume it's a hoax, until someone finds the first clue in the trail.

The creator, and many of the people still hunting for the clue, love classic 80s computer games, and much of the book is themed around them.

The book is quite well written. It was an easy and enjoyable read, and I remember many of the characters fondly, and the plot goes roughly where you expect, but with many realistic differences of opinion and reverses along the way.

The big question for any virtual-world novel is how to make doing things in the virtual world matter enough to be tense. There is often some technobabble that makes the experience as close as possible to someone teleporting into a world and then out again.

Ready Player One does this a bit better than average (there's good reason the ongoing quest needs to be completed without your avatar dying, and being ejected is disorientating, but doesn't have any implausible physiological effects). But it's still not quite plausible.

The world is a bit like Eve Online crossed with Steam. There are many games, worlds, learning environments, etc you can play. But you travel between them in a MMO way, needing to grind for coins to get spaceships or teleporters to different planets, etc, and there are extra-powerful one-off artefacts people can find that have an effect you couldn't normally find. It's consistent, which is very good, but I'm not sure if it's entirely plausible that all these different worlds tie together.

And it's odd that the bad guys are forced to play "by the rules" trying to fulfil the conditions of the challenge by finding the hidden object in the virtual world, rather than finding some way to bypass the intent of it. They do play dirty in the real world, but if you had the resources of a major company trying to hack Eve Online, I assumed they'd succeed, even if they had to suborn a lot of ISPs to do it.

Overall, I'd say if you like classic computer games, virtual worlds, or young adult novels, you should definitely read this, but possibly only once.

More fake sunk cost fallacies

I'm still not sure what to call this, but several more examples of what I compared to the sunk cost fallacy, but with an unexpected opportunity you need to ignore, instead of a pre-committed cost you need to ignore.

1. Oh hey, I thought of a REALLY REALLY CLEVER plot twist for my book. I'll put it in.

This seems to happen in even quite high-profile films, where the director is wedded to some clever idea that isn't what everyone else likes about the film.

The author phrase for it is, "murder your darlings" as in, even bits of the book (sentences, ideas, characters, turns of phrase, plot points) that you like, or even, ones that are REALLY GOOD, may still not be the ones that produce the best whole.

2. I was going to lie, but now I have an opportunity to lie by telling the exact literal truth and let someone misinterpret me.

There are some good reasons for this. You want to be able to mock them later. You (or society) want to put artificial barriers in the way of breaking your resolution not to lie so you don't do so repeatedly.

But basically, it's just the same as lying, so lie well. (A good lie is often as simple as possible and mostly close to the truth, but happening to contain the same words as the truth doesn't actually help.)

3. Oh look, I have lots of hearts, I'll preempt in hearts.

Sometimes you have a really good preempt, and want to bid it. But if the existing bidding says that your preempt won't help, there's no point doing it just because you'd been looking forward to getting an opportunity to make that bid.

4. Oh look, I found a really cheap weasel froblicator!

I should buy that, in case I ever need a weasel froblicator. It would be a shame if I needed to froblicate some weasels and had to buy one full price. OK, yes, it would be a shame, but how likely is it? Really?

The commonality

The common thread, to me, is that you're presented with an opportunity you subconsciously expected to be rare, and hence precious, and hence you want to make the most of it.

But that's only actually useful if the opportunity is something that actually helps. If someone gives you a free weasel froblicator and you don't need it, it's mostly just a burden.