Ready Player One

"Ready Player One draws heavily on eighties video games – it is a mashup of eighties arcade-style games, and this very immersive VR-enabled, massively-multiplayer world that’s imagined in the future. I think a lot of people have access to them [the eighties games] as cultural tropes, so that’s just really fun. “What are the potential social implications of gaming extending further into our lives, and how will it affect our relationships to others?” It taking these current trends around the rise of VR and people’s fascination with that, also cultural forces like income, inquality and other disparities… it takes those things to the extreme and crafts this fantasy world in which you get really good at this game, you have the potential to succeed. It tracks a particular character who is an underdog-type figure, really good at the game despite all odds who ends up meeting one of the creators of the game. It is sort of a classic feelgood adventure story. I actually think it is a pretty lighthearted book in that way. There’s going to be a movie version in the next year or so – Spielberg is signed up to direct it. Exactly. What I really like about it, or the reason why I think it is good for this list is that it melds this eighties gaming culture with current gaming culture tropes. I think that gives an interesting access point for readers from both generations to think: What are the potential social implications of gaming extending further into our lives, and how will it affect our relationships to our bodies and our relationships to others? Will it give us access we didn’t have before to people? Will it cut us off from ourselves in certain ways? It is really grappling with a lot of these questions. Yes, it is very fun. Yes, I’m definitely continuing to do research on this area, so I can tell you about one project that we are working on now. We have a project called All the Fields , and we are basically developing… Are you familiar with Twitch , the streaming video game platform? Oh, you really should check this out. Twitch allows you to very easily put a stream online of yourself playing a video game live. Just like you see my picture [on Skype], you can put your picture on screen and can be giving a blow by blow as you play – people love watching these streams. If you sign on to a stream, you can chat with the other people watching the stream and comment on what’s going on. So these days, when you are trying to decide whether to buy a video game, you might just go on to Twitch and watch someone streaming it, see what it is really like, see what they have to say about the game. Anyway, what we are doing is that we are taking biosensors, and we are building a plugin for use with Twitch that allows you to see the players bio-signals. So we’ve got a Microsoft Band that reads heart rate and skin response, and we are also using software that labels facial expressions from the webcam. If a player who is streaming user our plug-in, everyone can see how their heart rate is changing, how much they are sweating, and how the software would label their expressions in real time. Well, the interesting thing is that there have been waves of doing this behind the scenes for game developers and all sort of researchers in academia for a while, but there hasn’t yet been a release of those tools for players and spectators. We want to spark those conversations."