The "Ready Player One" trailer mildly freaked me out

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Shipyard Locked

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I randomly caught the Ready Player One trailer on another site and saw that Spielberg directed it.

Something about this particular plotline reaching the mainstream in such a major way actually freaked me out a bit.

The idea that our pleasant little hobbies have, in a matter of decades, grown into what could very likely be the dumping grounds for millions of excess humans in a nihilistic future kind of sucks the fun out of it all. Makes you question escapism.

I'm sure I'll be fine in a few hours, but damn, I'm not watching that.
 
If it helps, some indications are that the movie will be leaning on that theme a bit harder than the book did.
 
If it helps, some indications are that the movie will be leaning on that theme a bit harder than the book did.

That makes it worse.

It's Spielberg's involvement that really nails it. We've arrived, the zeitgeist is fully aware of the incoming problem.

A few minutes ago I saw a bit of an interview with Andy Serkis, the motion-capture guy, and it pointed out that databases of digital actors are in the works, ready to eventually contribute to making the creation of endless dreamscapes trivial. I don't know why I am so disconcerted tonight in particular, these topics have been bouncing around in futurism for a while after all, but I just got this terrible sense of impending utter futility. The games I love were a crude rehearsal for the hollowest decadence.

To some extent, we play these games to capture some artificial spark of the adventure and meaning our ancestors felt in more dangerous and driven times, but the idea that these games will perhaps grow past the need for even individual creativity and fill the whole horizon for the pointless underclass we are becoming seems like a really sick joke right now.

I need sleep.
 
Shipyard, you nailed much of my queasiness about the trailer. Very much interested in your additional thoughts on the movie.

And everyone else's too.

How was the book? I've heard rave reviews, but I wasn't sure if they were just marketing hype.
 
It's been some years since I read it, but I remember it as being a fun read, especially as a modern take on the cyberpunk genre.

That makes it worse.

It's Spielberg's involvement that really nails it. We've arrived, the zeitgeist is fully aware of the incoming problem.

Hmm, I may have accidentally mislead you with ambiguity. What I meant was, from some things I've heard the movie may more explicitly question the wisdom of the whole OASIS project and the escapism thus offered. This theme is subtly present in the book, and it's possible the author himself didn't realize it at first.
 
Shipyard, you nailed much of my queasiness about the trailer. Very much interested in your additional thoughts on the movie.

And everyone else's too.

How was the book? I've heard rave reviews, but I wasn't sure if they were just marketing hype.
Loved the book. I'm in my mid forties and it reads like someone made a quest out of gathering my favorite childhood memories.
 
I randomly caught the Ready Player One trailer on another site and saw that Spielberg directed it.

Something about this particular plotline reaching the mainstream in such a major way actually freaked me out a bit.

The idea that our pleasant little hobbies have, in a matter of decades, grown into what could very likely be the dumping grounds for millions of excess humans in a nihilistic future kind of sucks the fun out of it all. Makes you question escapism.

I'm sure I'll be fine in a few hours, but damn, I'm not watching that.

See, this is where being a perpetually depressed cynic comes in handy. You see the prospect of a meaningless life with no room for individual achievement before you, and you're horrified. I see the same thing and say, "meh, life was always meaningless and individual achievements were always illusionary - at least this hints that it will one day be meaningless with some decent production values, and that we won't have to scramble ever harder to pretend that we're achieving anything." :cool:
 
A good gaming session involves connecting with other people and sharing a good time. Playing RPGs has given me a lot of solid friendships that persist outside the game. You could probably give me an existential crisis about the amount of time I have spent playing video games or watching TV, but I'm comfortable with believing that tabletop RPGs have been a worthwhile part of my existence.
 
Fascinating to hear that the current trend in pop culture of embracing media from the 80s and 90s would fill someone with existential nihilism. I feel the complete, exact opposite. I'm thrilled (and rejuvenated) when I meet younger generations who admire and appreciate the stuff from my childhood. Nostalgia for my generation has been revived and kept alive. I feel good, actually, about that. Less... old, ironically enough!
 
I think one of the issues is that for a while the media-wide 80s/90s nostalgia wave we've been riding felt good for me too, but then it started to feel like part of a cultural holding pattern, one born of anxiety and a reluctance to stare the future in the face. Our country's collective unconscious currently behaves like a mildly-traumatized flock of bickering vultures, not a squadron of bold eagles.

I also feel it's telling that the 80s is really when the battle between two competing visions of the future started: that of the optimistic sci-fi of old and the grubby cyberpunk of the anomizing information age. It's like the 80s have returned to declare cyberpunk the winner, and I'm disconcerted.
 
I think one of the issues is that for a while the media-wide 80s/90s nostalgia wave we've been riding in felt good for me too, but then it started to feel like part of a cultural holding pattern, one born of anxiety and a reluctance to stare the future in the face. Our country's collective unconscious currently behaves like a mildly-traumatized flock of bickering vultures, not a squadron of bold eagles.

I don't really see it as any different than the inescapable Boomer nostalgia that the '80s were coated in. One of the clear influences on Stranger Things was It, which was an '80s book, but it was about kids in the '50s.

I also feel it's telling that the 80s is really when the battle between two competing visions of the future started: that of the optimistic sci-fi of old and the grubby cyberpunk of the anomizing information age. It's like the 80s have returned to declare cyberpunk the winner, and I'm disconcerted.
Not even close. 50, 60s and 70s science-fiction was dripping with dark visions. And I am talking mainstream as well. Look at 60s TV. The Twilight Zone was a bigger success than Star Trek.

That's just in recent memory. H.G. Wells was already writing about the anesthetizing effects of modern culture in The Time Machine. There never was an age of purely optimistic sci-fi.

Science fiction literature had already produced a whole library worth of dystopias and apocalypses by the time the '80s rolled around. Go back and read criticism of the time. Cyberpunk was considered a middle road, not a dark one. Humanity wasn't going to blow itself up in a nuclear war. We weren't going to live in a totalitarian future. It wasn't going to be utopia, but we'd do okay. I think it was Bruce Sterling who said that predicting apocalypse was easy and boring. The future was going to be more interesting and more complicated, and that was what cyberpunk was trying to show.
 
A very lucid and obviously correct post, Baulderstone. I take my post back.

I remain disconcerted however.

A good gaming session involves connecting with other people and sharing a good time. Playing RPGs has given me a lot of solid friendships that persist outside the game. You could probably give me an existential crisis about the amount of time I have spent playing video games or watching TV, but I'm comfortable with believing that tabletop RPGs have been a worthwhile part of my existence.

Yes, I'd say any hobby done face to face with friends has value. I'm fretting that tabletop is fast approaching the point where it won't be able to use flexibility as its trump card against video games anymore.
 
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So is the book actually good? I could never decide whether to read it or not.
 
So is the book actually good? I could never decide whether to read it or not.

Wondering the same thing here. The synopses I’ve read make it come across as horribly fanservice-y.
 
If we're making prophecies about the future based on media, my prediction is Blade Runner in a few, mega cities (spires?) and Mad Max everywhere else in the blasted wastelands in between. The super rich get expensive suites with real trees and tasty food while the rest of us get protein rich algae bars and tacky holograms.
 
If we're making prophecies about the future based on media, my prediction is Blade Runner in a few, mega cities (spires?) and Mad Max everywhere else in the blasted wastelands in between. The super rich get expensive suites with real trees and tasty food while the rest of us get protein rich algae bars and tacky holograms.

That actually really does sound like reality in the future.
 
*Yoinks

One thing I love about sci-fi with multiple star systems is that all the world ideas like this can exist in one setting.

With a single star system too; that’s pretty much The Expanse’s inners vs. belters divide (at least as seen by the belters; Earth has masses on “basic” and Mars only breaks from Earth thanks to Solomon Epstein).
 
*Yoinks

One thing I love about sci-fi with multiple star systems is that all the world ideas like this can exist in one setting.
Of course, you can do the same thing with setting with multiple countries. Just look at the real world. Although from an RPG perspective, separate planets are a good way to clarify things for the players.
 
Creating shorthand concepts for multiple worlds makes sense for simplicity and brevity in serial tv shows or whatever. It's far too broad and difficult to address the "real" complexities of entire planets.

For RPGs, world creation toolkits (see Stars Without Number) are so important for world-hopping sci-fi campaigns.
 
Yes, and yes; I agree with both ideas. I know there is a pushback against the "Planet of Hats" trope that sci-fi can pick up, like from original Trek, I feel it too.
I have different standards for RPGs and literature. If I am reading a SF novel and it deals in shallow stereotypes, I am usually disappointed. As a GM in an RPG, I have to convey a world to players in a few lines so that they can see it in their mind and interact with it. Cliches are my friend. I can always add subtle shading later, but I need a quick hook.
SWN is good; the caveat with any random world generation is that it can lack depth of detail, or the results can be contradictory.
I love random generators, but you need to be willing to modify the results or re-roll. When I hit a nonsensical result, I take a minute to consider it. Sometimes I can think of a clever way for it to make sense. Other times, considering the nonsensical idea simply makes me think of a cool idea of my own to substitute. If neither of those things happen, it is time to re-roll.

Sometimes I get an idea that make sense, but I just don't like it. Thinking about why I don't like it can lead me to an idea that I do like.
 
Yeah sometimes contradictory results can lead to interesting ideas. Thriving metropolis + Death World, for example, could mean many things: cities are giant domes; cities are ruins with mutant survivors; cities have biologically adapted to harsh conditions...

But yeah, no one is holding a gun to your head and saying "use the results as they are: no modification, re-rolls or rationalizing allowed!"
 
I guess so. I though that "Death World" was, like, Mercury or Venus: lifeless, barren and hostile wastelands.

But I get your point.

EDIT:
"a huge hub of interstellar activity, and right next door is a isolated "lost colony", it's hard to justify why people aren't going there"​

As an aside, I don't find your example all that difficult to figure out either: It's a "forbidden zone", the result of some sort of catastrophe. Sure, there's a lot of activity around there (in the planetary system, or hell, on the moon station of that very colony world), but no one sets foot down there due to the crazy radiation and time distortions that can cause havoc on equipment and organic brains. Or so the Galactic Government SAYS... Perhaps there's some huge secret down there that they don't want anyone to locate?
 
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Back to Ready Player One, I went and looked at the library computer to see if they had it, and it's listed under YA/teen fiction, which is kinda of a yuck to me. I am more of a Revelation Space or PF Hamilton's Commonwealth sort of sci-fi fan.
I wouldn't put too much stock in this - I've seen plenty of odd things put in YA, including both Robert E. Howard and J. R. R. Tolkien. Granted Ready Player One hits a few of the traditional markers - it does have a teen protagonist who play video games, after all - but that's really as far as it goes.
 
I think one of the issues is that for a while the media-wide 80s/90s nostalgia wave we've been riding felt good for me too, but then it started to feel like part of a cultural holding pattern, one born of anxiety and a reluctance to stare the future in the face.

Reminds me of this Onion article warning how we are almost out of nostalgia.
https://politics.theonion.com/u-s-dept-of-retro-warns-we-may-be-running-out-of-pas-1819564513

I'm thrilled (and rejuvenated) when I meet younger generations who admire and appreciate the stuff from my childhood.

What in particular?

I've noticed huge fandoms of 80s music among younger people...and often I find it weird when 80s music seems predominant at events, in stores or malls. I wonder why the fascination as I'm unsure why 80s corporate pop would be considered better than corporate pop from later decades.
 
It seems common for young people to romanticize the pop culture of a few decades earlier, in the 70s there was 50s nostalgia that you can see in everything from American Graffiti, Grease to punk rock. Growing up in the 80s we were drowning in 60s nostalgia, something most retro 80s stuff misses (Freaks and Geeks didn't of course).

I do find it surreal to hear claims that today's pop suck, 'not like in the 80s' or even more strangely 'the 90s.' The plastic nature of 80s pop drove me to despair until I discovered hip-hop, punk and death metal.
 
I've noticed huge fandoms of 80s music among younger people...and often I find it weird when 80s music seems predominant at events, in stores or malls.

Yeah, youtube is full of these strange little 24/7 nostalgia-fueled radio stations that play very chill lo-fi remixes of pre-2000s music. I'll confess, I do enjoy listening to them while working on stuff (and that's part of their stated function).

Here's an example I like:

 
I guess so. I though that "Death World" was, like, Mercury or Venus: lifeless, barren and hostile wastelands.
40k death worlds cover those, but also ones where the biosphere is thriving but also massively hostile to human life; predatory megafauna/flora, unstopped bioweapons, that sort of thing.
 
40k death worlds cover those, but also ones where the biosphere is thriving but also massively hostile to human life; predatory megafauna/flora, unstopped bioweapons, that sort of thing.
Possibly taking their name from the Harry Harrison. He of Stainless Steel Rat fame.
 
It seems common for young people to romanticize the pop culture of a few decades earlier, in the 70s there was 50s nostalgia that you can see in everything from American Graffiti, Grease to punk rock. Growing up in the 80s we were drowning in 60s nostalgia, something most retro 80s stuff misses (Freaks and Geeks didn't of course).

Freaks and Geeks, unlike Stranger Things, had the benefit of being of being made by people who were actually there. It get every detail right.

It's funny to me how the the Boomer nostaligia is being compacted into the current '80s nostalgia products. One of the touchstones of Stranger Things is the book It. That was written in the '80s, but it was very much about kids in the '50s. By using it as part of their template, Stranger Things has imported 50's cliches in to the '80s such as the bully in Stranger Things being a switchblade wielding 50's tough dressed up in '80s clothes.

And, of course, the recent movie of It, just imports the entire thing into the '80s.

I liked Stephen King's books as a teen in the '80s, but I still found them stodgily old-fashioned and uncool in a lot of his places. Any time a character would wax rhapsodic about stale classic rock, I would recoil a little.

I do find it surreal to hear claims that today's pop suck, 'not like in the 80s' or even more strangely 'the 90s.' The plastic nature of 80s pop drove me to despair until I discovered hip-hop, punk and death metal.
One of the most notable things about '80s pop culture is just how many different underground music scenes there were, all fleeing what was on the radio at the time.

I guess it helps that the '80s mixes of today are highly selective. If you look at that songs that made the top 10 for their year in the '80s, there are a lot of terrible songs that time has buried.

Just look at the top 5 songs of 1986. The most popular song of the year was "That's What Friends Are For", followed by "Say You, Say Me", "I Miss You", "On My Own" and "Broken Wings". That's a lot of treacle and the only one of those that is likely get played on an "*80's station" now is "Broken Wings".At #7, you have Eddie Murphy's "Party All the Time". And does anyone else remember when "Always" by Atlantic Starr was inescapable?

If you want to break kids today of '80s nostalgia, I suggest a mandate that '80s stations must play the actual top hits of the era in full. Truth in nostalgia![/quote][/QUOTE]
 
GW liberally "borrowing" ideas from anybody else? Surely not.
 
And does anyone else remember when "Always" by Atlantic Starr was inescapable?

If you want to break kids today of '80s nostalgia, I suggest a mandate that '80s stations must play the actual top hits of the era in full. Truth in nostalgia!

Read the comments section from this youtube posting of "Always" and be disabused. :grin:



Queen Psycho said:
I'm a 14 y/o. And I love this song. I guess songs in 80's were better than now.
 
My 15 year old daughter, who's been raised on music from the 1950s to the present, told me in the car that the music from the 80s was better than current music.
 
My 15 year old daughter, who's been raised on music from the 1950s to the present, told me in the car that the music from the 80s was better than current music.
I can believe that. And I speak as someone who utterly despised chart music from the 80s.
 
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