[This article contains spoilers.]
Yet in the hands of Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker, Daly becomes a tyrant on par with Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump while behind the controls of his own video game. What initially seems like a harmless escape from daily drudgery turns disturbing when we discover that the characters who populate the high-tech simulation aren’t merely programmed to obey Daly’s every command and regale him with constant praise—they’re virtual slaves whom Daly has physically tortured, blackmailed, or transformed into hideous monsters and stuck on some lifeless alien planet as punishment for falling out of line. Worst of all, these shipmates are versions of his real-life colleagues; Daly covertly uploaded them to the simulation using their DNA, which he harvested from objects around the office. After his first brief encounter with Nanette, Daly swabs her lipstick-stained coffee cup and installs a digital duplicate of her in his private playground to make her serve as the ship’s new science officer. These carbon copies have somehow retained their memories of their former lives and still feel pain. Which means that when Daly uses his omniscient control device to remove virtual Nanette’s mouth for refusing to obey, the flesh-and-blood Nanette feels a choking sensation.
Ready Player One takes this geek sycophancy to an entirely new level. Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel—being adapted into a Steven Spielberg film due out later this year—is the antithesis of “USS Callister.” It treats insular pop-culture obsessives, the kind who live to attend Comic-Con, constantly quote Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and lock themselves in their rooms all day to play World of Warcraft as the platonic ideal of a contemporary man. When Ready Player One protagonist Wade warps into an elaborate virtual world, his intellectually empty but encyclopedic knowledge of nostalgic juvenilia isn’t just cool—it’s needed to save the day.
