Ready Player One panders to a lame, sexist nerd culture that needs to die What does it mean to be a nerd in 2018? In an age when we all own a smartphone, coding’s […]

What does it mean to be a nerd in 2018? In an age when we all own a smartphone, coding’s on the curriculum and Game of Thrones is the world’s favourite TV show, the line between niche and normality is thinner than ever.

Being a nerd is no longer a form of social resistance, but a prerequisite to gaining a place among the world’s richest men (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg). Once the underdogs, there’s no doubt the geeks have indeed inherited the Earth.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines a nerd as both “a person, especially a man, who is not attractive and is awkward or socially embarrassing” and “a person who is extremely interested in one subject, especially computers, and knows a lot of facts about it”.

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Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One is Hollywood’s latest attempt to define and explore the boundaries of modern-day nerdism, largely by plundering the past.

Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) is an 18-year old living in a trailer park on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, in a dystopian 2045, following a global energy crisis which has plunged much of the world into abject poverty. Watts and the rest of humanity escape the drudgery of the real world through the Oasis, a virtual world where you can be anyone and do anything you please.

James Halliday, the reclusive co-creator of the Oasis, a Steve Jobs-esque tech hero, announces a competition on his deathbed to inherit his vast fortune and control of the entire platform, triggering a worldwide scramble to solve a series of fiendish clues in an Easter egg hidden deep within the Oasis universe.

Watts, in the guise of his online alias Parzival, encounters mysterious fellow “gunter” (egg hunter) Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) in his race to solve Halliday’s clues and save the Oasis from falling into the clutches of the shadowy megacorp Innovative Online Industries (IOI, headed by Ben Mendelsohn as Nolan Sorrento) in a furious whirlwind of relentless 1980s pop culture references. Video games, TV shows, books, cartoons, music, films, adverts: nothing is safe.

Whereas The Matrix was a triumphantly executed cautionary tale warning of the dangers of simulated realities, Ready Player One is both thin and overwrought, prioritising spectacle over any kind of substance and lacking any kind of menace which could have underpinned it with a certain amount of depth. As it is, it’s a never-ending retro I-Spy game. Freddy Krueger? Check. Chestburster from Alien? Check. Hello Kitty? Weirdly, also check.

If the 2011 source novel – which rapidly became a New York Times best-seller – was a tedious cavalcade of author Ernest Cline’s sheer eagerness to demonstrate just how much he knows about the 80s, the film is even worse. It differs from the book in almost every major plot point – not always a bad thing, given Cline’s predilection for blow-by-blow descriptions of Watts playing various games – but in the process still manages to make the entire exercise feel like being made to watch someone else playing Xbox for 140 minutes, or having them mansplain why Final Fantasy VII is so much better than Final Fantasy VIII.

Ready Player One is a celebration of everything modern society should be moving away from: white, heterosexual male relegation of women into minor supporting roles, cultural gatekeeping (see also: mansplaining), toxic masculinity and lazy rehashing of nostalgia presented as art. In her first encounter with Parzival, Art3mis has any agency she possessed in the book stripped away from her as she is recast from rescuer to helpless princess. Having rescued Watts from certain doom in the book, in the film, she becomes the victim in need of rescuing. 2011’s Art3mis may be two-dimensional, but to render her even more helpless in 2018 makes for uncomfortable viewing.

In the Ready Player One universe, women are only considered equal if they can reel off inane quotes and possess an encyclopaedic knowledge of media popular decades before they were even born. Given the resounding success of Wonder Woman and Black Panther, Ready Player One feels not only like a step backwards, but culturally problematic, points out Ryan Broderick, BuzzFeed’s deputy global news director, and co-host of the podcast Internet Explorer.

“It feels irresponsible to pander to men in a post-Gamergate society,” he says, in reference to the 2014 online hate-storm over sexism in video game representation, during which women received rape and death threats from men denying the industry had a problem. “There’s nothing romantic about the white male nerd, especially when they’re holding culture hostage.”

Broderick raises an interesting point. Nerd culture has never been more synonymous with mainstream interests, and the enormous success of the superhero films, which dare to put women and black social issues centre stage point to a much wider audience hunger for narratives and characters outside the male, pale and stale tropes.

Yet here we are, in 2018, watching a film directed by Steven Spielberg which references multiple films by Steven Spielberg. The director has said in an interview that after he was given the script he was determined to cut “at least 70 per cent of my own cultural references,” leaving around 20 per cent from the book. “I pride myself on my modesty. But I was part of the 80s, and I know that,” he added.

It’s also interesting to note the film is being released at a time when VR is arguably at its lowest ebb for years. Sony’s PlayStation VR headset has sold briskly, beating its rivals Oculus Rift and HTC Vive to be the first platform to cross the million-unit sales mark, but a lack of seriously compelling games and price tags too high for the merely curious consumer, mean VR is still very much a niche pastime.

Now we’re all cultural and social nerds, the scope of what it is acceptable to obsess over has considerably widened beyond solely pop culture and by extension, technology. Ready Player One is a wearying, outdated memorial to a narrow brand of nerdism, which still panders to a demographic who refuse to acknowledge that they are no longer the sole arbiters of taste.

Plus, the film’s closing line is “Reality is the only thing that’s real,” which goes to show that being a nerd is no guarantee you are intelligent.

‘Ready Player One’ is on general release from today