RPO = Ready Player One
RPF = Ready Player Fuck
Ready Player One is creatively bankrupt, entirely unoriginal and comically poorly-written. It lacks depth, has no personality of its own and attempts to validate its existence by constantly pointing to other works. This franchise combines every possible narrative cliché along countless thoughtless references in order to construct the most meaningless, emptiest story it could get away with. Satire of Ready Player One is automatically satire of the context that allowed such abhorrent creation to be conceived and achieve success, because, more than it is garbage, Ernest Cline’s (and sequentially Steven Spielberg’s) miscarriage of a production is reflective of a rising trend in pop culture as a whole.
Art isn’t its own anymore. It’s hard to find people who can view works in a vacuum. Movies, games and books are always described as “a combination of X and Y”, “the X of Y games”, “a spiritual successor to X”. This behavior stems from a deep lack of autonomous thinking, since the consumer can’t develop an original view towards new art, only compare it to productions that are already solid in the public consciousness. This brainless form of engagement with media results in the replacement of art’s essence. A work is no longer full of meaning, its value lies in what it represents. The art you engage with and how you engage with it define your personality, your place in a group. Works are stripped of meaning and reduced to contextless “aesthetics” . You don’t simply “like” Yume Nikki for its intrinsic value, you have to repost pictures of fragile , performatively melancholic Japanimation girls holding knives. You don’t “like'' American Psycho, you repeat the main character’s crass immorality as a philosophy. The type of “aesthetic” tied to the things you enjoy dictates your worldview and the group you fall into. People become the media they consume, not by profoundly reflecting on their experience with art, but by using it to define their personality. "You" aren’t "yourself", you are a combination of media X, Y and Z. It's mirrored in Ready Player One, a patchwork of various pop culture sources that attempts to fill an inherent lack of identity with cheap references. In this sense, appealing to nostalgia is abusing the detached aesthetic elements of a work that marked the spectator’s past and define their personality today, which is why the franchise has seen so much success. It appeals to an almost primitive impulse triggered in the average consumer’s mind when they witness a reference to something recognized as “good”.
Ready Player Fuck is simply the logical conclusion to Ready Player One and what its popularity represents. It is the final stage of hyper-consumerist entertainment, a universe that exists solely to please that primitive impulse, a world in which everything is in service of a reference, a way to please the spectator. Begging for praise and attention, RPF grabs you by the head and forces you to look at 30 references at once. It cries: “Remember Star Wars? Remember Hatsune Miku? Remember Godzilla?” RPF isn’t any different from the average social media feed, in which reiterations of the same media are regurgitated over and over again in unchanging styles in order to please a thoughtless audience. The only difference between RPO and RPF is that the latter recognizes and embraces its desecration of pop culture, making a point of consciously degenerating everything it incorporates.
It is fitting that the parody of a culturally massified, overproduced and insincere intellectual property is a haphazardly thrown-together bag of trash created by one person. RPF is part of a genre of ironic games created not to deliver a decent experience but as a window into the creator’s specific sense of humor. Crack-Life, Jamie's Mod (Half-Life mods), Real Human Bean, TAX DEDUCTION (Hotline Miami 2 mods) and GAME OF THE YEAR 420 BLAZE IT come to mind, all self-conscious profanations of existing IPs. Playing one of these games may feel like you’re having a conversation with the creator, as they serve as unfiltered displays of someone’s inner artistic vision (even if that vision includes Manny Pardo getting a prostate exam). Sincerity in irony, something RPO could never hope to achieve.
From the developer being the sole voice of every character to the visual style’s consistent terribleness, it’s clear RPF is a shitpost. It wouldn’t work otherwise, since the game drags Ernest Cline to its level and beats his head with a rock. Its crude nature and lack of polish allow you to see past the impressive visual effects and bombastic set pieces to understand RPO’s narrative for what it is: shallow, stupid and desperate. Witnessing a Homer spaceship attack a legion of T-posing Master Chiefs sounds hysterical until you realize it’s a situation only one or two models away from an actual scene in the movie. RPF does this with characterization too, the dialogue reads like it was written by someone who doesn’t talk to other people. The main character is a generic heroic self-insert and the love interest is “not like the other superficial girls because she’s a nerd and likes the same videogames as the main hero”.
Ready Player Fuck, by assaulting you with revolting collages of pop culture references and tired tropes, constructs a minimalist portrait of how the mindless consumer interacts with art. All it takes is a scroll through social media to understand how empty a work can become when it is reduced to a recognizable shell of itself for the sake of an audience’s cheap excitement.
RPF = Ready Player Fuck
Ready Player One is creatively bankrupt, entirely unoriginal and comically poorly-written. It lacks depth, has no personality of its own and attempts to validate its existence by constantly pointing to other works. This franchise combines every possible narrative cliché along countless thoughtless references in order to construct the most meaningless, emptiest story it could get away with. Satire of Ready Player One is automatically satire of the context that allowed such abhorrent creation to be conceived and achieve success, because, more than it is garbage, Ernest Cline’s (and sequentially Steven Spielberg’s) miscarriage of a production is reflective of a rising trend in pop culture as a whole.
Art isn’t its own anymore. It’s hard to find people who can view works in a vacuum. Movies, games and books are always described as “a combination of X and Y”, “the X of Y games”, “a spiritual successor to X”. This behavior stems from a deep lack of autonomous thinking, since the consumer can’t develop an original view towards new art, only compare it to productions that are already solid in the public consciousness. This brainless form of engagement with media results in the replacement of art’s essence. A work is no longer full of meaning, its value lies in what it represents. The art you engage with and how you engage with it define your personality, your place in a group. Works are stripped of meaning and reduced to contextless “aesthetics” . You don’t simply “like” Yume Nikki for its intrinsic value, you have to repost pictures of fragile , performatively melancholic Japanimation girls holding knives. You don’t “like'' American Psycho, you repeat the main character’s crass immorality as a philosophy. The type of “aesthetic” tied to the things you enjoy dictates your worldview and the group you fall into. People become the media they consume, not by profoundly reflecting on their experience with art, but by using it to define their personality. "You" aren’t "yourself", you are a combination of media X, Y and Z. It's mirrored in Ready Player One, a patchwork of various pop culture sources that attempts to fill an inherent lack of identity with cheap references. In this sense, appealing to nostalgia is abusing the detached aesthetic elements of a work that marked the spectator’s past and define their personality today, which is why the franchise has seen so much success. It appeals to an almost primitive impulse triggered in the average consumer’s mind when they witness a reference to something recognized as “good”.
Ready Player Fuck is simply the logical conclusion to Ready Player One and what its popularity represents. It is the final stage of hyper-consumerist entertainment, a universe that exists solely to please that primitive impulse, a world in which everything is in service of a reference, a way to please the spectator. Begging for praise and attention, RPF grabs you by the head and forces you to look at 30 references at once. It cries: “Remember Star Wars? Remember Hatsune Miku? Remember Godzilla?” RPF isn’t any different from the average social media feed, in which reiterations of the same media are regurgitated over and over again in unchanging styles in order to please a thoughtless audience. The only difference between RPO and RPF is that the latter recognizes and embraces its desecration of pop culture, making a point of consciously degenerating everything it incorporates.
It is fitting that the parody of a culturally massified, overproduced and insincere intellectual property is a haphazardly thrown-together bag of trash created by one person. RPF is part of a genre of ironic games created not to deliver a decent experience but as a window into the creator’s specific sense of humor. Crack-Life, Jamie's Mod (Half-Life mods), Real Human Bean, TAX DEDUCTION (Hotline Miami 2 mods) and GAME OF THE YEAR 420 BLAZE IT come to mind, all self-conscious profanations of existing IPs. Playing one of these games may feel like you’re having a conversation with the creator, as they serve as unfiltered displays of someone’s inner artistic vision (even if that vision includes Manny Pardo getting a prostate exam). Sincerity in irony, something RPO could never hope to achieve.
From the developer being the sole voice of every character to the visual style’s consistent terribleness, it’s clear RPF is a shitpost. It wouldn’t work otherwise, since the game drags Ernest Cline to its level and beats his head with a rock. Its crude nature and lack of polish allow you to see past the impressive visual effects and bombastic set pieces to understand RPO’s narrative for what it is: shallow, stupid and desperate. Witnessing a Homer spaceship attack a legion of T-posing Master Chiefs sounds hysterical until you realize it’s a situation only one or two models away from an actual scene in the movie. RPF does this with characterization too, the dialogue reads like it was written by someone who doesn’t talk to other people. The main character is a generic heroic self-insert and the love interest is “not like the other superficial girls because she’s a nerd and likes the same videogames as the main hero”.
Ready Player Fuck, by assaulting you with revolting collages of pop culture references and tired tropes, constructs a minimalist portrait of how the mindless consumer interacts with art. All it takes is a scroll through social media to understand how empty a work can become when it is reduced to a recognizable shell of itself for the sake of an audience’s cheap excitement.