I actually believe that poor performance of IOI was a intentional commentary of obsessive nature of the owner. Who most likely was punishing harshly his players for any shred of independent thinking. And as such only desperate people work work him, with almost zero to none retention. What also is a common corporate problem. This actually would elana poor quality of the workers, who either notoriously rage quit the job, or simply do not try. While arguably not realistic in way it was shown. Someone would find out solution by mistake or boredom. Was again, surprisingly decent commentary of the corporate mentality.
Slave Gamer Caps actually are a thing in the China. Where people are forced grind resalable IRL resources, during they sentences in the prison. That part is also surprisingly realistic. Honestly this make my respect movie more!
I mean. If we think about it. Even if that was not the original intention. This world was basically turn into shit by Oasis! I remind that most people do not live in camper blocks because they are poor, as most of them absolutely can afford expansive gaming rigs. But live there because they do not care spending most of the time in the video game anyway. This in fact is sick rotting society. So alternative motivation for main villain in fact seams legit. And TBH it isn't that uncommon when bad guy is actually correct. Like Joker in The Dark Knight is actually correct whole time and his actions actually solve the problem of organized crime in the city.
@@TheRezroAnd his aforementioned vendetta against Haliday would drive him to try to beat Haliday's contest without Haliday's help, which looking for clues in the Journals would be seen as.
You're telling me a company wants to to take control of a popular media franchise only to instantly destroy it with advertisements and microtransactions? That's not realistic at all.
Still hoping for the day Media Zealot does a new series about Villains and Sci-Fi civs that are actually smart enough to win/exist. I genuinely can't think of that many.
Sorrento's arrest at the end made more sense in the book because he was just the head of IOI's Ovology department, not the CEO of the whole company, and early in the book the higher-ups leaved very clear that they would trow him under the bus the moment he wasn't useful anymore... the movie does some of the character stuff better but the worldbuilding in the book makes more sense to an extend
Ngl, the first key made ten times more sense in the book. In that context it was hidden on a world that was used only for virtual school. No one thought it could possibly hide something like that because it was a nothing world in the oasis. Do it makes way more sense why no one has found it in the book until Parzival finds it because literally no one could’ve guessed it would be there. Also the challenge was cooler because it was essentially a homage to old adventure video games. But I assume that the movie removed that because it wasn’t cinematic enough.
The IOI sleeper cell theory has always been my head canon for this movie. It explains how their egg hunters behave throughout in a very consistent way. They carry unnecessary coins into races then wreck themselves to power up the non-IOI participants, don't really try to make any progress on finding the keys, wilfully ignore the clues provided to them, make sure to give the good guys clues by visibly ruling out things that would be the wrong path... It's pretty clear they don't want Sorrento to win and they're intentionally sabotaging his efforts. Oh and worth pointing out the real world parallels between IOI's intended take-over of the OASIS and MySpace's take-over by News Corp... Sorrento = Rupert? They even got an Aussie to play the role and everything.
Good points. I did wrestle with the idea of the Sixers and the Oologists being actively disincentivised from winning the comp, but I also wondered whether their contracts made certain guarantees of bonuses, and a transition to other roles should they win. IOI would be set to massively expand should they assume control of the OASIS, I imagined the Sixers would be used as their OASIS enforcers and the like.
Huh, this makes alot of sense considering the trust and investment seemingly put into sixers despite their poor performance... Its clear some are dedicated and loyal employees, like the Adventure guy near the end and the "police" enforcer people, so it's only reasonable there are other Sixers on the opposite side of the spectrum. And at the end of the day isn't this just another job for these people? And mind you, its a job they pretty much share with what are essentially slaves... Ide be dragging my feet too, that sounds depressing af... Just look at streamers who burnt themselves out on a game because they get paid to play it, the only difference here is the Sixers have a souless corp and boss to focus their problems on opposed to a burnt out streamer who would tend to become self destructive. The more you think about it the more the Sixers look like an inevitable weakness, should rebrand to "LOL" 😆
@@MediaZealot They likely would be guaranteed bonuses, but it'd likely be a 'winner take all' type of thing where only one or a small handful of people actually get it, and likely also a small enough amount that everyone agreeing to just plug along and only look like they're trying probably makes them more in the long run. Even if the bonus is in the 6-7 figure range, 10 years at their current wage would basically be the bonus, but for everyone.
Aside from the movie being total trash compared to the book, that first challenge definitely pissed me off! Whoever wrote this script knows nothing about gamers! Players discover far, far more obscurely hidden secrets in games in no amount of time. Driving backwards would have been cracked in a few short hours. And they could have at least cleaned it up by saying the game is coded that the backwards driving only works if you watched that Haliday clip within the last few hours, or something along those lines.
To me, the movie's third challenge takes the cake. The Easter Egg in Adventure is not only obvious, the book version of James Halliday uses it to explain what a video game Easter egg is, in his announcement of the hunt!
The school one actually made so much sense. Why didn’t they just find a way to adapt that to expand on the lacking dystopian social commentary the movie had
It's a lot like things in the anime Sword Art Online. In the second season it's a vr shooter game, where no one uses melee or snipers because they're too hard to make work. In reality there'd be hundreds of players doing each, either to just be different or as a challenge build.
The worst part about this whole thing is that, realistically, there is no way IOI should've lost, in the book it makes more sense, but in the movie they would've had the first key the moment the hunt started
The big plot hole with hiring professionals to go after something worth a lot more than their job or even the entire company they work when they could just go after it on their own breaks the story completely. So I'd have to say that's the worst part.
@@immikeurnot Thats not the point, the point is (at least in the book) that it costs many resources and real money to hunt that egg. And you have to live too, you cant just breath and drink rainwater to survive/live. And in the books I0I is a much worse and much much bigger (they basically rule the world or at least the US) company that drives people in to dept and such things. Those are the reasons why people would join them rather then try it on their own. Plus they offer students stuff/a place to study and future employment/positions if they get too old (avarage pro players retire at age 30 max) to play or theyd manage to win. If you havent read the book and like the concept i can highly recommend that😁
Oh and another thing: They predicted that Overwatch (the original one) would still exist by 2045. They didn't knew that 4 years after film was released (2022), Blizzard would shut down Overwatch 1 and replace it with Overwatch 2.
Ironically, if IOI took ever OASIS and made it so annoying that it lost mass appeal, then Humanity might be better off. It would force them off their escapist fantasy world and to confront the rot taking hold of the real world.
HA! A hopeful dream that I wish were the case but a large group of humans coming together for the greater good has only happened once in history and very briefly.
Because the mega corps that running the planet into the ground are totally not just going to spread misinformation to control the general public.......
That race would have been figured out in the first day. There are way to many people who would try to go backwards right off the bat with no hints at all. People do it all the time in online racing.
If a group of less than 200 trolls can find a flag in the middle of the desert, where the camera is pointing upwards, in less than two days, by studying weather patterns and planes, the movies version of the Easter egg hunt wouldn’t have lasted a week. A better real life version of this was the Bill Cipher IRL hunt, which took cooperation across the globe to be solved and it was over in two weeks
Movie 'driving backwards is so tricky' meanwhile speedrunners 'alright I've got to put objects on these three pixels and cap my fps to get the right memory leak, and then I point my camera a specific direction while swapping weapons as fast a possible to do spawn manipulation, and if I hit jump on the correct frame I'll get teleported to the end. Hooray, I did it 0.01 seconds faster that time, new PB!'
@@anubusx if you can't manage a reference without drastically damaging your movie, maybe make a different reference. It's not like it's hard to squeeze a modified Delorean in somewhere
@@anubusx yeah... and the idea that no-one had tried it is still terrible. At least make it the second test, so of course no-one has tried it yet since no-one had unlocked that game yet. Turning off aim assist could be a neat reference to star wars, but making that the first thing is also dumb because of how commonly people do that, particularly the most skilled players.
Lately I’ve been thinking about how stupid the Covenant are as a civilization and villains. I don’t hate their stupidity as it was well written on purpose but I would love Media Zealot to roast them and the prophets. The best example would be the replacement of the elites for brutes, like that was a big gamble that the brutes didn’t consider the same fate could happen to them.
The UNSC didn't defeat the Covenant. The Covenant defeated themselves. First mistake was tolerating the problematic culture of the Brutes. Pride driven domineering muscle heads with constant roid-rage. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? One slight power struggle and everything will crumble. Second (in no particular order) is allowing such a strict power structure. The grunts getting tired of being on the bottom rung of society damn near destroyed the Covenant. You can go ahead and say the grunts are more dangerous than they look, but realistically, ANY of the multiple covenant species could cause quite a ruckus if mistreated enough. Third: entirely ignoring the threat of the Flood. This speaks for itself.
Heretic! the covenant was years within stomping out the entirety of the human race if it wasn’t for the discovery of the halo ring which released the flood and set in motion the civil war
@@houselightkellThey didn't ignore the threat of the Flood. The Flood didn't really start messing them up until the In Amber Clad jumped into High Charity mid Great Schism. How was Truth supposed to deal with that? A war on two fronts is incredibly difficult to manage, as seen in history.
I think Halo 1 was the only truly great Halo game. The covenant weren't just aliens, but they were actually alien in the sense that they were totally unknown to us. Halo 2 just went "Herr derr they're actually just religious so we can make them dumb" and Halo 3 went "oh yeah forgot to mention they're too stupid to realize the weapon is a weapon"
I will say both the Alliance and the Horde in WoW deserve a take on Civilizations too Stupid to Win. Fatal flaws including "the Warchief position being barely anything besides a guarantee of rebellion", "both Horde and Alliance refusing to effectively use strategy, technology, or magic, to solve their issues", "the SI:7 being useful only to their enemies", and so much more.
Actually the fatal flaw was a creatively bankrupt sexual harasser in too important of a position, that the rest of the team let get away with taking the story in the worst direction possible for two expansions, thanks to relying on swinging the villain bat, and making up BS that undermined some of their most iconic characters to set up an unheard of BBG "who so totally has been masterminding things".
Also more major stupid examples for the Hoard: They let in a bunch of insane soul/mind warped maniacs and supremacists run rampant in their ranks and caused 90% of their issues then wonder why everyone hates them. Seriously why did the hoard let so many objectively evil factions join them? Half of all hoard factions are objectively evil and often sabotage or outright attack the hoard itself. The lack of punishment for these actions is another layer of stupid on top of it! This also makes you wonder why the sane hoard factions(Trolls,Tauren, Blood Elves, Sane Orcs, Loyal Goblins, ext) haven't left the hoard to get away from all the bad actors within the hoard who actively attack them.
To be fair, I could pick everything from the Warcraft universe and it would be too stupid to win (yeah, even the iconic guys like Arthas). Probably the only ones who could avoid it are minor characters like the vanCleef. That said, who better to represent the idiots gallery than the two idiot main "characters" themselves?
Only reason it got canonized was because ernest cline realized that nolan had no real motivations when he wrote him and saw some poor sap put more thought into his work.
The author of the fanfic was actually Andy Weir, better known for writing _The Martian._ Getting to write a bit of _Ready Player One_ lore must have been a nice little bonus for him.
As a neurodivergent person myself; making a hyper realistic virtual world where you can live out your fantasies sounds EXACTLY like something we'd do! It's the most realistic part of the whole movie, in my opinion.
Not sure what you hoped to gain from typing this comment when it's quite obvious that was the main draw of this movie. You didn't type anything profound, so you're better off deleting this pathetic comment.
And unlimited motivation to deliberately get killed out of the race, thus knocking off work early and denying IOI what it wants. Also, Nolan probably wouldn't have trusted any actually-competent player not to grab the egg for themselves.
Not true, they are paid employees. But I do agree they're not motivated to do well, probably because they're lowly paid and/or hate their employer. There is one thing in the movie that shows their status as employees. When Samantha leaves IOI HQ, you can see a whole bunch of Sixers hanging around outside, presumably taking a break. Whereas the loyalty centre slaves live in cells and have their movements tightly controlled.
@@MediaZealot Fair enough, I clearly missed that scene; I always saw them all as the same, which made sense why they were so inept, rather than it just being bad writing 🤭
What I thought was stupid was that "on X days Oasis is closed" I'm thinking "Bro, what if those are my days off, those would be my only days to play and you just locked me out.
I think the one thing that can explain why nobody tried the "going in reverse" strategy is that there is likely a minimum account balance you have to have to play. If you have to have a minimum of $100 each time you try, it would limit experimentation attempts. It would also explain why the IOI employee accounts have any amount of money on them. Then again, it is possible that the IOI corporate skin has a fee attached that employees get docked for when they die, which would be perfectly in-character for them.
There IS a minimum fee. You literally have to have GAS to run the race (plus a vehicle). Without these two things, you cannot play the race. Note too that Artemis gets her bike damaged in the race and she has to go to Aech to get it fixed. So you need money for vehicular repairs as well. All of which may be part of the reason that the sixers needed some extra cash. It may also be that there are no banks or storehouses in the Oasis, which may be why zeroing out is so brutally painful.
"Failing to understand (...) the basics of why the Oasis is popular, he wants to fundamentally transform the nature of an established game." There are a lot of comparisons one could make to real-world games companies. But I'm not going to be the one to make them.
Driving backwards at the start is idiotic. What it should have been is to drive the whole course backwards and King Kong just lets you. Fits the riddle, and just maddeningly difficult enough for nobody to have done it
IOI is hardly unrealistic. Look at how Embracer group bought the valuable Arkham IP, filled it with monetization, and destroyed it. Real video game companies love adding monetization while cannibalizing what made a game franchise actually profitable.
And if the movie version of the villain had succeeded his version of the Oasis would have pushed players out and in likely a very short amount of time someone would start their own without all the BS and everyone would move to that sim.
To be fair to IOI it would be hard to do so. As it has so many services that probably would immune to the ad rule like schools and businesses which host their own private oasis. However any gamers would indeed quit
18:24 that's the funniest shit ever I guess OSHA didn't care about the shock collars but emergency exits in case of a fire? Even IOI won't mess with that.
The way they should have done the car driving backwards scene, to make it more believable would have been to have the easter egg only work if you have the DeLorean as your car skin and then you must enter the destination time of November 5, 1955 and lastly reach 88 mph before the hatch behind is unlocked. Edit: one thing I would add would be to change the clue Halliday gives to him instead saying "Why cant we go backwards really fast, really put the peddle to the metal. Doc Brown did it". Which I would argue is a better fit, since Bill and Ted never actually put the peddle to the metal but Doc Brown did.
In defense of Nolan: Have you *seen* the modern AAA games industry? Sony just had to roll back on locking Helldivers 2 PSN account locked, DESPITE it being insanely successful without any interference on their part, and this got through multiple layers of corporate bureaucracy, only getting their attention when massive numbers of players started dropping returns on the game, and ratioing the game into the ground.
The basic premise of the movie is silly. Had the kid who wrote the book or anyone who wrote the movie ever met a group of video game hypernerds, they'd know this contest would've been solved within a day, tops.
At the bare minimum, the first two keys are found within a day. And this is me giving the benefit of the doubt that maybe the pro guys were lazy because it was sunday or something.
@@Crazieyboy15 That's the thing, though: Where's the fun or joy in watching something like that? It'd maybe be done that fast, but, in a challenge like that, it's less about speed and more about the thrill of the hunt.
The only reason i can think of for keeping all of their player equipment as company branded stuff is because there might be some legal grounds to where if they were to say use a lot of stuff from existing games to win the competition, then whatever company made them would be entitled to some of it. If so then yeah i can understand why its all like that, but they could have at least made some better gear. Everyone just has like a laser rifle and then there are those big walker things and thats it? They probably could have afforded to get an actual star destroyer there from star wars and used that to defend the final place.
Seeing how entertainment corporations are cutting corners everywhere, at cost of the quality; the bad equipment of the 6s is making more sense as the time goes on.
This video basically applies to any foe in a MMORPG in or out of the system. Sao is all the villains same with any anime like it and even western villains fall flat against gamers
Honestly the whole concept of, "Its in a videogame/ the other world works exactly like a video game" is a very weak setting because it devalues the work of the protagonist and the world building comes across as lazy.
Who ever came up with the solution for the car race definitely never has met Trackmania players... :D One of them would have found the solution in the first few races. Not, because they're bad, but because they'll start looking pretty much for that: Not so obvious ways to get to the finish line. Possibly faster than by staying on track. All part of the game. :)
IOI understands advertising about as well as UA-cam. You aren't selling time or space, you're selling consumer attention. The more ads you shove in, the less attention any individual ad gets, and the more people will opt out of interacting with ads at all. These two things drive down the apparent value of ads, and the only way to get the value back up is enforced scarcity. UA-cam tries to sell ads targeting American consumers for an average of $9 per 30,000 seconds of watch time (CPM, Cost Per Millie, or 1000 30 second ad impressions), and keeps 45% of it, passing along less than $5 to the actual productive earners on the platform, and that's why it isn't working. 30,000 seconds is over 8 hours. I will not do something I don't want to do for a value of less than $0.50/hr, which is what they're asking us to do. The median American wage is around $75,000. That's around $36/hr. That's what the average payout to content producers needs to be for ads to be a competitive option compared to asking fans for money directly. If you want me to spend half a minute of my time listening to some boring pitch for some crappy product I don't want, you're gonna need to pay what my time is worth. Don't reward UA-cam's incompetence and greed with money. Don't pay for premium. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.
Would have thought that hardcore gamers would know about going backwards, or turning around at the start of games to find easter eggs/collectables would be the first thought, since gamers have been doing that for decades now.
Presumably, IOI's egg-hunting employees don't give a single solitary damn about gaming, just about doing what they have to do to get their paycheck. And given how utterly soul-crushing modern corporate America is (to say nothing of the dystopian, hyper-capitalist future of RP1), that means they're not motivated to put in any more effort than they absolutely have to in order to get paid and not get fired. In turn, this likely means that even if they ponder the idea of going backwards for shits and giggles, they quickly talk themselves out of it because they suspect that deliberately NOT racing would be a one-way ticket to a pink slip and utter destitution.
Yeah, this movie did not age well. Really, the book did not either. Weaponized nostalgia now has been done to death. A bunch of people in 2045 that still basically live for the 1980's makes zero sense. The pandering to gamer nerds was immense. The head of the game was really a sad man and pitiful. They never even comment on how egocentric it is for the whole quest to be based on little things from this guy's life. The whole quest was basically a monument to a loner loser. They also never once think about if everyone being in a game instead of trying to fix society is a bad idea. And I do agree with the video that it should have taken IOI about a minute to go to the library of the game creator to learn everything about the nerd once it was obvious the keys were based on his life.
The implication is that the Sixers, being essentially debt slaves, despise IOI and do not want IOI to win the contest and are throwing the contest on purpose and have been for years. And the IOI Halliday Scholars LOVE the Oasis and know full well that Nolan intends to destroy it, so they are dragging their feet on producing ANY actual progress towards helping.
In the movie with Bruce Willis called "Surrogates" humanity has developed robots that can be anything they want, strong, beautiful, healthy, gorgeous looking replicants that humans control via living in a pod, SPOILER! At the end of the movie Bruce Willis gains access to the mainframe and the tech guy is telling him to do the right thing, so Bruce turns it off and everyone comes out their houses seeing a new day. That's how this movie should have ended! Not with stipulations and regulations just turn off the device that distracting you from real world issues!!
I wonder if the resources required to manage an awake population is at hand or everyone will starve due to the increased demand for food, heating and other resources that skyrocket overnight. Ready Player One.. well I like that the Movie looks like crap as that actually helps it look more like a Videogame and might help it age better too. that said I can't imagine wanting to watch it twice.
While I'm getting what you're saying, in the original story (of Surrogates) a large number of people remove themselves, including the main character's wife. When a large number of people rely on something, just taking it away is a REALLY bad idea.
The Oasis have basically replaced the internet by the time the book and movie take place, getting rid of it would not only completely destroy the economy, but also would destroy any progress of anyone who was already trying to fix real world issues.
XD Is it messed up that the whole time you were talking about point one, my thoughts kept going, "Wait....are you talking about a company in the modern day or are you talking about the movie....you are talking about the movie right?....right???"
I kinda feel like it's picking low hanging fruit pointing out the stupidities in 'Retro Cultural References: The Novel' and 'Retro Cultural References: The Movie' 🙂
@@TrashJack3000 the fact that he owns a DeLorean was an important part of the promotion of the first book. I remember the posters announcing book-reading events on libraries had the phrase "will be where the DeLorean is parked" under the adress and there was an Easter Egg hunt (apparently there was somekind of secret code in the 1rst edition of the novel) whose 4 winners would get one DeLorean each. In the video announcement of the Easter Egg hunt Cline said "you could win a DeLorean likes the one behind me, but not that one especifically, because its mine"
TBH, CEO's not aware of their customers and destroying the companies future for short term profit is something that happens today, so I can see the IOI doing what the movie shows and he probably would have gotten a fat check for that and retire...
Well, Ready Player One is obviously that Facebook hoped to create with Metaverse. Considering how much money they spent to archive nothing it seems they really need to drain all Earth resources to do that
Youre telling me this multi-million dollar company not only hired trash players to farm but couldn't hire some data miners and hackers? Not only that, they couldnt put a tracker on the kid to lead him to the prize then ban his account and reap the rewards? Am i making too much sense?
I can explain the hackers part. The oasis is an giant vr based internet live service thus its basically impossible to hack it. Its like hacking the whole internet as there are various public, semiprivate and private worlds within
@@orangecat504Attempting to do so probably would get the IOI staff (really don't like the name because that's the same name as the Hitman devs) zeroed out so hard Oasis staff would literally ban them from real life.
I guess this movie helped embody how communities of players generally can guide a game to a healthier point than a surprising number of companies by their meticulous investment into lore and mechanics. Generally, as I said. I know a bunvh of metagamers ruin build diversity and then cry about it. Eyesores, they are.
Ideally, you want a company that listens to its players on what makes the game fun to build off of it, but also knows when to ignore them when their suggestions go against the spirit of the game. Helldivers is a good example of that. You let one group or the other take full control and ignore the other, and it'll go downhill really fast.
What the metaverse showed is how far we are to have any realistic games like the oasis. The book said you can see the entirety of the star wars galaxy, realistic virtual porn, schools, etc.
The villain's plans making Oasis unplayable is stupid, but has much real life precedence. CEOs of entertainment companies killing the goose that lays the golden eggs is happening a lot.
Sorrento's scheme isn't actually all that terrible. Haliday's egg-hunt had been a big deal for the first few years, but then, when nobody found anything for years, it was largely abandoned by the vast majority of Oasis players. At that point, IOI had the biggest and most powerful Egg-hunter guild and they were accumulating tons of high-end loot. They might not be the best players (or the best motivated players), but brute force is a superpower all on its own. After some initial excitement the egg-hunt is largely forgotten and becomes more of an urban legend than anything else. It doesn't really get SERIOUS until Parzival finds the first key. And by that point, IOI has a massive and powerful army, AND an organization of egg scholars that can sift and analyze data. Any while Parzival and his team are the first to the first two clues, IOI actually gets to the 3rd challenge before anybody else. They also get *close* to winning and only lose because literally the whole Oasis turns against them.
I never watched the movie. The book was a piece of obnoxiously self-insert fiction where video game God would make you emperor of the world if you were nerdy enough (don't worry, the main character gets good at everything too), and I had no desire to watch the movie after that.
I also just can't get over how easy the first trial was. Go backwards? Really? That was the stumper? It's like Zealot said, the race has been unwinnable for so long that SOMEONE would have just tried going backwards out of boredom.
Pure oxygen isn't 'toxic' (toxic = poisonous, a poison being a chemical that stops respiration inside cells, causing rapid death of cells and then the organism), but it is a definite health hazard, needing careful management.
On the subject of Nolan having the password on his rig seat, it's probably for administrative functions. Facial recognition would be the default login, once setup, like most people use a finger print or face image to log into their phone, but has a pin or other code for additional setup. And if it's the admin password, that would obviously make sense for Samantha being able to log in regardless of facial recognition.
I have literally not heard a single good thing about the sequel novel that was written AFTER the movie came out despite the first book being mad old. The author wrote a cash grab, it was garbage, and Hollywood sees fit to turn it into a movie, so another cash grab. It tracks honestly.
0:59 Why would someone wear REAL boxing gloves to virtually box? I get that you want to feel the weight of the gloves, but do you need REAL gloves to do it 3:43 Why does killing off a random line of sixers in the game knock out the same line of them IRL? 5:07 That's what evert player wants to see on their screens, 80% of the screen taken up with random pop up ads. If IOI HAD won the challenge and done this, they'd be out of business in a week, if that. The fact that the pop ups could cause seizures, doesn't even concern him. 6:10 Why are they allowing kids this young to play the game? 12:06 DOES IOI pay their employees? It's established that IOI has a legion of "indentured servants" locked up in their "loyalty centers" being forced to work for them to pay off their "crimes" to IOI.
Well Suicide Squad exists. But in all seriousness ads in games can be non seizure inducing the more realistic version would be to do ad walling (like paywalling but with ads) certain content.
The cinematography is way worse than I remember: super washed-out color palette mixed with crazy lens flair, uncanny looking CGI and sprinkle some shaky cam in there. Gross.
Actually trying to win the big competition just so he could destroy the Oasis would make the villain into a stealth hero of sorts. After all, he gets to save the world as part of getting revenge. And even the movie concedes that the damn VR world is basically a 21st century opium den with comparable effects on the real world & its people. If they do make that character change canon then the bad guys weren’t actually too stupid to win, they were sabotaged quite intelligently.
I have a suggestion for an advanced sci-fi civilization that may warrant some scrutiny, the Chozo from Metroid. For the record I absolutely love the Metroid series, but it's just so funny to me how the Chozo, for being too stubborn to abandon SR388; a planet they could've easily left to live somewhere else; they created the Metroids which ended up indirectly provoking a civil war, a pirate invasion and later the liberation of the X parasite, all of which ended up destroying at the very least 3 Chozo civilizations with the latter putting the entire galaxy at risk. Now that I think about it the Space Pirates and specially the Galactic Federation did some utterly stupid shenanigans, so an episode on the Metroid series as a whole may be quite substantial.
The reason why sixers are dogsh*t at the game is that IOI doesn't wanna pay them and they get paid from the outside through sabotaging IOI, remember these guys are in a crippling debt.
That's what bothered me about that scene; he may have been armed, but, with the amount of people surrounding him, he would've been disarmed and dispatched in seconds.
For real. This guy openly refers to it as a "ghetto-trash rat warren," yet not only does he go there with no protection, but no one tries anything? I don't want to sound insensitive, but if this place is so bad - which it seems to be - surely someone would have tried to stab the guy in the suit without even having context just to rob him.
The only vaguely interesting thing I found in the entire film is Jane Douglas (From Outside Xbox) is one of the sixers (Visible at 14:45). The rest of it just seemed to be ramming pop culture references in the audience's face.
The world of _Ready Player One_ should be the subject of a "Sci-Fi Civilizations too stupid to actually exist" video. "Peak Oil happened, so now everyone lives in giant overstacked trailer parks and spends all day in VR Chat." Bruh, who is doing the farming? Who is doing the mining, the refining, all of the technical work required to make this gamer lifestyle possible? Where are the backup logistics systems? Even if there's no oil anymore, steam locomotives are still perfectly functional as long as you have distilled water and wood, coal, charcoal, or even vegetable oil. And if everyone's playing VR Chat all day, there's still enough of a power grid for electric trams and electric trains, right?
You know, it would have been awesome to see the first challenge from the book get played out. Watching the hero navigate the Tomb of Horrors only to play a game of Joust against a lich would be absurdly funny to watch, and there's so many ways you could play that up to look epic, then switch briefly to show the two players just playing on arcade machines.
I have been playing videogames for more than 30 years, if this movie was aimed at an specific audience it will be me, but I found it so painfully dumb, it is just a bunch of videogame references that someone who does not know anything about gaming just put together. *The protagonist is completely unlikable. *The romantic relationship is there just because he is a man and the other character is a girl. *The villain decides to wear a suit that can make you feel PAIN on a game, imagine how moronic that is. *Everyone is from the same city eventhough they are playing online.
I mean if I could land a job where making NO PROGRESS would continue to pay check and completing my task meant my job was OVER? I wouldnt actually finish anything. Why would I?
The race in the movie was one of the stupidest things to have done with an even dumber solution. Whoever came up with that has never watched people play online before. If all you have to do is reverse at full speed, that was solved day 1. At least in the book, it took a lot of information about Haliday and people paying very specific attention to areas that weren't likely to be explored, and it took skills and knowledge of a DnD module and an ancient at the time arcade cabinet. Plus, maybe I'm just still grouchy about not getting the Tomb of Horrors on the big screen...
The problem I have with video game movies is how clear the disconnect is between filmmakers, writers, directors , and those who actually play video games as a passion. These stories will often only reference other games but nobody looks at the industry as a whole, what gamers like and don’t like in video games, and how to make a story around common modern tropes. Many of these stories also have extremely unreasonable consequences for dying in the game. Ready player one resets your progress, spy kids 3D is a permanent ban. Sword art online of course, “you die in the game, you die for real,” How about a story where whenever you die, you either need to pay a micro transaction to respawn or wait a long amount time? It’s an extreme consequence for dying but ties into something many players relate to and hate dealing with.
i know its not the case, but i like to consider this crap movie an intentional parody of modern hollywood, massivly bloated, devoid of creative thought and dependant on sucking the life from old ips reliant on fanbases they utterly and openly hate....
I mean. Corporations reusing old content, is actually most realistic part of this movie.
On top of that, overmonetization issue is also HUGE real problem of video game industry. Also realistic!
I actually believe that poor performance of IOI was a intentional commentary of obsessive nature of the owner. Who most likely was punishing harshly his players for any shred of independent thinking. And as such only desperate people work work him, with almost zero to none retention. What also is a common corporate problem. This actually would elana poor quality of the workers, who either notoriously rage quit the job, or simply do not try. While arguably not realistic in way it was shown. Someone would find out solution by mistake or boredom. Was again, surprisingly decent commentary of the corporate mentality.
Slave Gamer Caps actually are a thing in the China. Where people are forced grind resalable IRL resources, during they sentences in the prison. That part is also surprisingly realistic. Honestly this make my respect movie more!
I mean. If we think about it. Even if that was not the original intention. This world was basically turn into shit by Oasis! I remind that most people do not live in camper blocks because they are poor, as most of them absolutely can afford expansive gaming rigs. But live there because they do not care spending most of the time in the video game anyway. This in fact is sick rotting society. So alternative motivation for main villain in fact seams legit. And TBH it isn't that uncommon when bad guy is actually correct. Like Joker in The Dark Knight is actually correct whole time and his actions actually solve the problem of organized crime in the city.
@@TheRezroAnd his aforementioned vendetta against Haliday would drive him to try to beat Haliday's contest without Haliday's help, which looking for clues in the Journals would be seen as.
You're telling me a company wants to to take control of a popular media franchise only to instantly destroy it with advertisements and microtransactions? That's not realistic at all.
Pfft, like one huge company could own like all the media. Oh, wait...
@@deathraygonzo6339 so disney?
Oh you sweet summer child
@@aerodynamiccow3597He's being sarcastic
Geeze, I can't Think of One single company there will be so inept as to do that. 😅
“Arresting the CEO for his obvious crimes. That’s how you know this world is fictional.” Lol. Very true.
It's sad how true that is
In the real world the trash kills other trash
A kinder fait than being a whistle blower.
To be fair he was actively hunting a bunch of children with a gun before he gets arrested.
Suprisingly enough, the novel actually explains this by saying that with the 500 billion dollars, they could buy a better lawyer than IOI.
Now, there's one crime CEOs get punished for, ripping off other rich people. That shit's not tolerated.
Still hoping for the day Media Zealot does a new series about Villains and Sci-Fi civs that are actually smart enough to win/exist. I genuinely can't think of that many.
Yatjua, as a civilization? Some clans are smarter than others... it's the predators
Or that SHOULD HAVE WON?!
@@robm6726 I might be bias but that's a really good one. I'd love for him to do a video on the Predators even if he doesn't think the same.
Media Zealot presents: heroes too stupid to win
@@jonathanrobst5144The Autobots video was somewhere around that idea.
Sorrento's arrest at the end made more sense in the book because he was just the head of IOI's Ovology department, not the CEO of the whole company, and early in the book the higher-ups leaved very clear that they would trow him under the bus the moment he wasn't useful anymore... the movie does some of the character stuff better but the worldbuilding in the book makes more sense to an extend
Like the first egg purposefully being in a school thus nolan and Samantha got both keys after they discover it
In the books you would also have the destruction of the Stack that he ordered and the other Character that got murdered by him.
Ngl, the first key made ten times more sense in the book.
In that context it was hidden on a world that was used only for virtual school. No one thought it could possibly hide something like that because it was a nothing world in the oasis.
Do it makes way more sense why no one has found it in the book until Parzival finds it because literally no one could’ve guessed it would be there.
Also the challenge was cooler because it was essentially a homage to old adventure video games. But I assume that the movie removed that because it wasn’t cinematic enough.
The IOI sleeper cell theory has always been my head canon for this movie. It explains how their egg hunters behave throughout in a very consistent way. They carry unnecessary coins into races then wreck themselves to power up the non-IOI participants, don't really try to make any progress on finding the keys, wilfully ignore the clues provided to them, make sure to give the good guys clues by visibly ruling out things that would be the wrong path... It's pretty clear they don't want Sorrento to win and they're intentionally sabotaging his efforts.
Oh and worth pointing out the real world parallels between IOI's intended take-over of the OASIS and MySpace's take-over by News Corp... Sorrento = Rupert? They even got an Aussie to play the role and everything.
Good points. I did wrestle with the idea of the Sixers and the Oologists being actively disincentivised from winning the comp, but I also wondered whether their contracts made certain guarantees of bonuses, and a transition to other roles should they win. IOI would be set to massively expand should they assume control of the OASIS, I imagined the Sixers would be used as their OASIS enforcers and the like.
Huh, this makes alot of sense considering the trust and investment seemingly put into sixers despite their poor performance...
Its clear some are dedicated and loyal employees, like the Adventure guy near the end and the "police" enforcer people, so it's only reasonable there are other Sixers on the opposite side of the spectrum.
And at the end of the day isn't this just another job for these people?
And mind you, its a job they pretty much share with what are essentially slaves...
Ide be dragging my feet too, that sounds depressing af...
Just look at streamers who burnt themselves out on a game because they get paid to play it, the only difference here is the Sixers have a souless corp and boss to focus their problems on opposed to a burnt out streamer who would tend to become self destructive.
The more you think about it the more the Sixers look like an inevitable weakness, should rebrand to "LOL" 😆
@@Free_Krazy And no one would be the wiser, lOl
@@MediaZealot They likely would be guaranteed bonuses, but it'd likely be a 'winner take all' type of thing where only one or a small handful of people actually get it, and likely also a small enough amount that everyone agreeing to just plug along and only look like they're trying probably makes them more in the long run. Even if the bonus is in the 6-7 figure range, 10 years at their current wage would basically be the bonus, but for everyone.
@@MediaZealot from what I remember from the book, IOI contract would stipulate that if you won, the stuff went to your boss
In defense of the sixes, considering they would no longer be needed once the Oasis is claimed, they have a ligit reason not to succeed.
Aside from the movie being total trash compared to the book, that first challenge definitely pissed me off! Whoever wrote this script knows nothing about gamers! Players discover far, far more obscurely hidden secrets in games in no amount of time. Driving backwards would have been cracked in a few short hours.
And they could have at least cleaned it up by saying the game is coded that the backwards driving only works if you watched that Haliday clip within the last few hours, or something along those lines.
To me, the movie's third challenge takes the cake. The Easter Egg in Adventure is not only obvious, the book version of James Halliday uses it to explain what a video game Easter egg is, in his announcement of the hunt!
Any% speedrunners showing up to do that in the first minute.
The school one actually made so much sense. Why didn’t they just find a way to adapt that to expand on the lacking dystopian social commentary the movie had
They would've datamined that shit before the contest even went live.
It's a lot like things in the anime Sword Art Online. In the second season it's a vr shooter game, where no one uses melee or snipers because they're too hard to make work. In reality there'd be hundreds of players doing each, either to just be different or as a challenge build.
The sad part is how realistic IOI's behaviors and stupidity are when compared to real-world media companies.
Oh yeah, an out-of-touch executive chasing profits in a way that makes the core product less appealing is something that does happen.
@@javonyounger5107Why did visions of todd howard come to mind while reading your post, 😂.
They have really been burning billions of dollars over the last decade haven't they?
The worst part about this whole thing is that, realistically, there is no way IOI should've lost, in the book it makes more sense, but in the movie they would've had the first key the moment the hunt started
That's the danger of adaptations!
XD
The big plot hole with hiring professionals to go after something worth a lot more than their job or even the entire company they work when they could just go after it on their own breaks the story completely.
So I'd have to say that's the worst part.
Have u seen how incompetent corporations are these times
@@immikeurnot Thats not the point, the point is (at least in the book) that it costs many resources and real money to hunt that egg. And you have to live too, you cant just breath and drink rainwater to survive/live. And in the books I0I is a much worse and much much bigger (they basically rule the world or at least the US) company that drives people in to dept and such things. Those are the reasons why people would join them rather then try it on their own. Plus they offer students stuff/a place to study and future employment/positions if they get too old (avarage pro players retire at age 30 max) to play or theyd manage to win. If you havent read the book and like the concept i can highly recommend that😁
@@immikeurnot They signed away the rights to the Egg, which is why they didn't care about it.
A company ruining a franchise and their profits is unrealistic, well allow me to introduce you to EA.
*Laughs in Command and Conquer *
Or Disney as of late.
AAA in a nutshell
And Disney
I love it when non gamers have to create a game in their story or write gamer characters in their story. Its like we are a different species to them
Free Guy seems like the closest they’ve gotten to me, and even then it feels like they just sat down and watched a single Vanossgaming video.
Ikr? 😂
Oh and another thing:
They predicted that Overwatch (the original one) would still exist by 2045.
They didn't knew that 4 years after film was released (2022), Blizzard would shut down Overwatch 1 and replace it with Overwatch 2.
And it is not like gaming is a hard hobby.Just buy a decent laptop or a console and create an account for the game service.1 hour at most.
@@jacobxiaolong9104 Should've made the prediction with TF2 instead.
Ironically, if IOI took ever OASIS and made it so annoying that it lost mass appeal, then Humanity might be better off.
It would force them off their escapist fantasy world and to confront the rot taking hold of the real world.
Or it would give rise to a market of nock-off, illegal mods and hacks. People will not go gentle into that good awakening
HA! A hopeful dream that I wish were the case but a large group of humans coming together for the greater good has only happened once in history and very briefly.
Because the mega corps that running the planet into the ground are totally not just going to spread misinformation to control the general public.......
@@InvasionAnimation The world ended up destroying them and now foreigners control their country.
How would that be any different from banning most forms of entertainment in real life?
That race would have been figured out in the first day. There are way to many people who would try to go backwards right off the bat with no hints at all. People do it all the time in online racing.
If a group of less than 200 trolls can find a flag in the middle of the desert, where the camera is pointing upwards, in less than two days, by studying weather patterns and planes, the movies version of the Easter egg hunt wouldn’t have lasted a week.
A better real life version of this was the Bill Cipher IRL hunt, which took cooperation across the globe to be solved and it was over in two weeks
Movie 'driving backwards is so tricky'
meanwhile speedrunners 'alright I've got to put objects on these three pixels and cap my fps to get the right memory leak, and then I point my camera a specific direction while swapping weapons as fast a possible to do spawn manipulation, and if I hit jump on the correct frame I'll get teleported to the end. Hooray, I did it 0.01 seconds faster that time, new PB!'
That scene is a reference to Back To The Future 3
@@anubusx if you can't manage a reference without drastically damaging your movie, maybe make a different reference.
It's not like it's hard to squeeze a modified Delorean in somewhere
@@lordsrednuas
I mean the scene where Marty is about to race Needles but instead drives backwards to avoid having the accident Doc warned him about.
@@anubusx yeah... and the idea that no-one had tried it is still terrible.
At least make it the second test, so of course no-one has tried it yet since no-one had unlocked that game yet.
Turning off aim assist could be a neat reference to star wars, but making that the first thing is also dumb because of how commonly people do that, particularly the most skilled players.
The book first egg being at school Should’ve been in the movie which would erase this massive plot hole
Lately I’ve been thinking about how stupid the Covenant are as a civilization and villains. I don’t hate their stupidity as it was well written on purpose but I would love Media Zealot to roast them and the prophets. The best example would be the replacement of the elites for brutes, like that was a big gamble that the brutes didn’t consider the same fate could happen to them.
Especially when their plans would mean committing suicide
The UNSC didn't defeat the Covenant. The Covenant defeated themselves. First mistake was tolerating the problematic culture of the Brutes. Pride driven domineering muscle heads with constant roid-rage. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? One slight power struggle and everything will crumble.
Second (in no particular order) is allowing such a strict power structure. The grunts getting tired of being on the bottom rung of society damn near destroyed the Covenant. You can go ahead and say the grunts are more dangerous than they look, but realistically, ANY of the multiple covenant species could cause quite a ruckus if mistreated enough.
Third: entirely ignoring the threat of the Flood. This speaks for itself.
Heretic! the covenant was years within stomping out the entirety of the human race if it wasn’t for the discovery of the halo ring which released the flood and set in motion the civil war
@@houselightkellThey didn't ignore the threat of the Flood. The Flood didn't really start messing them up until the In Amber Clad jumped into High Charity mid Great Schism. How was Truth supposed to deal with that? A war on two fronts is incredibly difficult to manage, as seen in history.
I think Halo 1 was the only truly great Halo game. The covenant weren't just aliens, but they were actually alien in the sense that they were totally unknown to us. Halo 2 just went "Herr derr they're actually just religious so we can make them dumb" and Halo 3 went "oh yeah forgot to mention they're too stupid to realize the weapon is a weapon"
IOI really seems like it was created by someone who has no idea how anything works, including how existing online games make money.
aka, the author
Embracer Group?
@@zuzoscornerThe books a little more coherent
IOI is the leader of EA
@@InvasionAnimationThe CEO of EA kinda looks like a younger version of Sorento. Both are even Australian.
They chose a terrible font because I thought they were called 101 or LOL.
IOI is dumb as hell, but sadly (or perhaps fortunately?) far from unrealistically so.
It's a good day when Media Zealot uploads.
It time
IoI is basically EA games down to the evil plan even the CEOs look similar.
I will say both the Alliance and the Horde in WoW deserve a take on Civilizations too Stupid to Win.
Fatal flaws including "the Warchief position being barely anything besides a guarantee of rebellion", "both Horde and Alliance refusing to effectively use strategy, technology, or magic, to solve their issues", "the SI:7 being useful only to their enemies", and so much more.
Actually the fatal flaw was a creatively bankrupt sexual harasser in too important of a position, that the rest of the team let get away with taking the story in the worst direction possible for two expansions, thanks to relying on swinging the villain bat, and making up BS that undermined some of their most iconic characters to set up an unheard of BBG "who so totally has been masterminding things".
WoW story writing is bad 90% of the time, cool lore and character were the things that keep the franchise afloat and now they are gone
Horde vs Alliance, a battle between Chaotic Stupid and Lawful Stupid that is so poorly written that it alienates every section of the player base.
Also more major stupid examples for the Hoard: They let in a bunch of insane soul/mind warped maniacs and supremacists run rampant in their ranks and caused 90% of their issues then wonder why everyone hates them.
Seriously why did the hoard let so many objectively evil factions join them? Half of all hoard factions are objectively evil and often sabotage or outright attack the hoard itself. The lack of punishment for these actions is another layer of stupid on top of it!
This also makes you wonder why the sane hoard factions(Trolls,Tauren, Blood Elves, Sane Orcs, Loyal Goblins, ext) haven't left the hoard to get away from all the bad actors within the hoard who actively attack them.
To be fair, I could pick everything from the Warcraft universe and it would be too stupid to win (yeah, even the iconic guys like Arthas). Probably the only ones who could avoid it are minor characters like the vanCleef.
That said, who better to represent the idiots gallery than the two idiot main "characters" themselves?
The true winner of this whole thing is the fanfiction author whose story got canonized. That there is a holy grail for a fan
Still, it hinges on admitting to being a fan of this.... writing
Dante from the divine comedy?
Only reason it got canonized was because ernest cline realized that nolan had no real motivations when he wrote him and saw some poor sap put more thought into his work.
The author of the fanfic was actually Andy Weir, better known for writing _The Martian._ Getting to write a bit of _Ready Player One_ lore must have been a nice little bonus for him.
@@gelchert Ah. Still a cool story, but not quite the epic “My hero recognized me!” vibe as what I originally imagined.
As a neurodivergent person myself; making a hyper realistic virtual world where you can live out your fantasies sounds EXACTLY like something we'd do!
It's the most realistic part of the whole movie, in my opinion.
Not sure what you hoped to gain from typing this comment when it's quite obvious that was the main draw of this movie. You didn't type anything profound, so you're better off deleting this pathetic comment.
The 6'ers aren't employees, they are debt slaves, working in indentured servitude to IOI so have limited motivation to do well
And unlimited motivation to deliberately get killed out of the race, thus knocking off work early and denying IOI what it wants. Also, Nolan probably wouldn't have trusted any actually-competent player not to grab the egg for themselves.
I saw them more as mercenary force than indentured servents
Not true, they are paid employees. But I do agree they're not motivated to do well, probably because they're lowly paid and/or hate their employer.
There is one thing in the movie that shows their status as employees. When Samantha leaves IOI HQ, you can see a whole bunch of Sixers hanging around outside, presumably taking a break. Whereas the loyalty centre slaves live in cells and have their movements tightly controlled.
In the book, they were a mixture. Wade actually marvels when he encounters one who, as he noted, could just leave.
@@MediaZealot Fair enough, I clearly missed that scene; I always saw them all as the same, which made sense why they were so inept, rather than it just being bad writing 🤭
What I thought was stupid was that "on X days Oasis is closed" I'm thinking "Bro, what if those are my days off, those would be my only days to play and you just locked me out.
I think the one thing that can explain why nobody tried the "going in reverse" strategy is that there is likely a minimum account balance you have to have to play. If you have to have a minimum of $100 each time you try, it would limit experimentation attempts. It would also explain why the IOI employee accounts have any amount of money on them. Then again, it is possible that the IOI corporate skin has a fee attached that employees get docked for when they die, which would be perfectly in-character for them.
There IS a minimum fee. You literally have to have GAS to run the race (plus a vehicle). Without these two things, you cannot play the race. Note too that Artemis gets her bike damaged in the race and she has to go to Aech to get it fixed. So you need money for vehicular repairs as well. All of which may be part of the reason that the sixers needed some extra cash. It may also be that there are no banks or storehouses in the Oasis, which may be why zeroing out is so brutally painful.
"Failing to understand (...) the basics of why the Oasis is popular, he wants to fundamentally transform the nature of an established game."
There are a lot of comparisons one could make to real-world games companies. But I'm not going to be the one to make them.
ubisoft*coughs*
Driving backwards at the start is idiotic. What it should have been is to drive the whole course backwards and King Kong just lets you. Fits the riddle, and just maddeningly difficult enough for nobody to have done it
IOI is hardly unrealistic. Look at how Embracer group bought the valuable Arkham IP, filled it with monetization, and destroyed it. Real video game companies love adding monetization while cannibalizing what made a game franchise actually profitable.
Yeah, unfettered capitalism at its worst, possibly the biggest Evil ever to threaten the world. It's a good thing they ARE pretty syupid.
Video game corporations. Actual real life leeches, as well as in the movie
And if the movie version of the villain had succeeded his version of the Oasis would have pushed players out and in likely a very short amount of time someone would start their own without all the BS and everyone would move to that sim.
To be fair to IOI it would be hard to do so. As it has so many services that probably would immune to the ad rule like schools and businesses which host their own private oasis. However any gamers would indeed quit
18:24 that's the funniest shit ever
I guess OSHA didn't care about the shock collars but emergency exits in case of a fire? Even IOI won't mess with that.
They aren't REAL shock collars , so it's a loophole
they are "feedback" collar that responds to shock.
I imagine the Sixers are just there to get paid and don't actually care about getting better at the race.
Their initials also look like the acronym for 'laugh out loud'
since their success rate is a joke.
The way they should have done the car driving backwards scene, to make it more believable would have been to have the easter egg only work if you have the DeLorean as your car skin and then you must enter the destination time of November 5, 1955 and lastly reach 88 mph before the hatch behind is unlocked.
Edit: one thing I would add would be to change the clue Halliday gives to him instead saying "Why cant we go backwards really fast, really put the peddle to the metal. Doc Brown did it". Which I would argue is a better fit, since Bill and Ted never actually put the peddle to the metal but Doc Brown did.
Even then the book was better that was hidden at a school
@@orangecat504 I do believe they were onto something with the race, but just missed the mark with its excecution.
Imagine if all of this was real and millions of 40k fans just formed the space marine legions under the emperor of man
In that case wvery one of this players would try to murder the emperor, just to see what happens next 😁.
100% can confirm campers are the first people to call out others for "camper moves"
"Does anyone have a spinning top ready?"
Fucking gold
Yep, that's Inception for you.
In defense of Nolan: Have you *seen* the modern AAA games industry? Sony just had to roll back on locking Helldivers 2 PSN account locked, DESPITE it being insanely successful without any interference on their part, and this got through multiple layers of corporate bureaucracy, only getting their attention when massive numbers of players started dropping returns on the game, and ratioing the game into the ground.
The basic premise of the movie is silly. Had the kid who wrote the book or anyone who wrote the movie ever met a group of video game hypernerds, they'd know this contest would've been solved within a day, tops.
Did you read the book too or just watch the movie? Your comment only applies to the movie.
At the bare minimum, the first two keys are found within a day.
And this is me giving the benefit of the doubt that maybe the pro guys were lazy because it was sunday or something.
@@Crazieyboy15 That's the thing, though: Where's the fun or joy in watching something like that? It'd maybe be done that fast, but, in a challenge like that, it's less about speed and more about the thrill of the hunt.
The only reason i can think of for keeping all of their player equipment as company branded stuff is because there might be some legal grounds to where if they were to say use a lot of stuff from existing games to win the competition, then whatever company made them would be entitled to some of it. If so then yeah i can understand why its all like that, but they could have at least made some better gear. Everyone just has like a laser rifle and then there are those big walker things and thats it? They probably could have afforded to get an actual star destroyer there from star wars and used that to defend the final place.
Seeing how entertainment corporations are cutting corners everywhere, at cost of the quality; the bad equipment of the 6s is making more sense as the time goes on.
This video basically applies to any foe in a MMORPG in or out of the system. Sao is all the villains same with any anime like it and even western villains fall flat against gamers
Honestly the whole concept of, "Its in a videogame/ the other world works exactly like a video game" is a very weak setting because it devalues the work of the protagonist and the world building comes across as lazy.
A single Korean hardcore gamer would've found all these keys and easter eggs on week one.
You aren't that imaginative a person, are you?
Who ever came up with the solution for the car race definitely never has met Trackmania players... :D One of them would have found the solution in the first few races. Not, because they're bad, but because they'll start looking pretty much for that: Not so obvious ways to get to the finish line. Possibly faster than by staying on track. All part of the game. :)
IOI understands advertising about as well as UA-cam.
You aren't selling time or space, you're selling consumer attention.
The more ads you shove in, the less attention any individual ad gets, and the more people will opt out of interacting with ads at all. These two things drive down the apparent value of ads, and the only way to get the value back up is enforced scarcity.
UA-cam tries to sell ads targeting American consumers for an average of $9 per 30,000 seconds of watch time (CPM, Cost Per Millie, or 1000 30 second ad impressions), and keeps 45% of it, passing along less than $5 to the actual productive earners on the platform, and that's why it isn't working.
30,000 seconds is over 8 hours.
I will not do something I don't want to do for a value of less than $0.50/hr, which is what they're asking us to do.
The median American wage is around $75,000. That's around $36/hr. That's what the average payout to content producers needs to be for ads to be a competitive option compared to asking fans for money directly. If you want me to spend half a minute of my time listening to some boring pitch for some crappy product I don't want, you're gonna need to pay what my time is worth.
Don't reward UA-cam's incompetence and greed with money. Don't pay for premium. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.
Well that was the whole point. They would infest the Oasis with ads and then sell a subscription to the only ad blocker that works in the Oasis.
Would have thought that hardcore gamers would know about going backwards, or turning around at the start of games to find easter eggs/collectables would be the first thought, since gamers have been doing that for decades now.
Presumably, IOI's egg-hunting employees don't give a single solitary damn about gaming, just about doing what they have to do to get their paycheck. And given how utterly soul-crushing modern corporate America is (to say nothing of the dystopian, hyper-capitalist future of RP1), that means they're not motivated to put in any more effort than they absolutely have to in order to get paid and not get fired. In turn, this likely means that even if they ponder the idea of going backwards for shits and giggles, they quickly talk themselves out of it because they suspect that deliberately NOT racing would be a one-way ticket to a pink slip and utter destitution.
Yeah, this movie did not age well. Really, the book did not either. Weaponized nostalgia now has been done to death. A bunch of people in 2045 that still basically live for the 1980's makes zero sense. The pandering to gamer nerds was immense. The head of the game was really a sad man and pitiful. They never even comment on how egocentric it is for the whole quest to be based on little things from this guy's life. The whole quest was basically a monument to a loner loser. They also never once think about if everyone being in a game instead of trying to fix society is a bad idea. And I do agree with the video that it should have taken IOI about a minute to go to the library of the game creator to learn everything about the nerd once it was obvious the keys were based on his life.
The book aged better as it did have more social commentary.
Well to be fair as a motorsport fan. I have seen a lot of highly paid professionals crash into each other at the first corner quite often.
The implication is that the Sixers, being essentially debt slaves, despise IOI and do not want IOI to win the contest and are throwing the contest on purpose and have been for years.
And the IOI Halliday Scholars LOVE the Oasis and know full well that Nolan intends to destroy it, so they are dragging their feet on producing ANY actual progress towards helping.
I always loved the Idea of fully immersive VR. That would be a dream. But yeah, this movie, and especially, this corp, makes no sense.
Like in the older "Existenz" where the world has layers over layers and its really hard to figure out whats real anymore.
In the movie with Bruce Willis called "Surrogates" humanity has developed robots that can be anything they want, strong, beautiful, healthy, gorgeous looking replicants that humans control via living in a pod, SPOILER! At the end of the movie Bruce Willis gains access to the mainframe and the tech guy is telling him to do the right thing, so Bruce turns it off and everyone comes out their houses seeing a new day. That's how this movie should have ended! Not with stipulations and regulations just turn off the device that distracting you from real world issues!!
I kinda like that movie...
I wonder if the resources required to manage an awake population is at hand or everyone will starve due to the increased demand for food, heating and other resources that skyrocket overnight.
Ready Player One.. well I like that the Movie looks like crap as that actually helps it look more like a Videogame and might help it age better too. that said I can't imagine wanting to watch it twice.
While I'm getting what you're saying, in the original story (of Surrogates) a large number of people remove themselves, including the main character's wife. When a large number of people rely on something, just taking it away is a REALLY bad idea.
The Oasis have basically replaced the internet by the time the book and movie take place, getting rid of it would not only completely destroy the economy, but also would destroy any progress of anyone who was already trying to fix real world issues.
@@bencox3641 Oh DEAR
XD
Is it messed up that the whole time you were talking about point one, my thoughts kept going, "Wait....are you talking about a company in the modern day or are you talking about the movie....you are talking about the movie right?....right???"
Yeah, a company running a game into the ground is the most realistic part of the story.
IOI are stupid, but they're goddamn geniuses compared to most AAA video game execs.
Love this! And if you want more Ben Mendelson on this channel, there's always "Advanced Sci-fi Civilizations too Stupid to Really Exist: The Skrulls"
How about the kree too
All marvel have this problem. And now the vultrimites are dumb ask heck.
They're just too uninteresting to even ironically make a good video
I kinda feel like it's picking low hanging fruit pointing out the stupidities in 'Retro Cultural References: The Novel' and 'Retro Cultural References: The Movie' 🙂
The first key would have been found before the beta version of the race XD
Ironically, the author of the book Ernest Cline, lives not far from me. He drives a DeLorean.
Why does that last sentence not surprise me?
@@TrashJack3000 He showed up to the movie premiere dressed like Marty McFly as well. I think he might have enjoyed the 1980s almost as much as I did.
@@TrashJack3000 the fact that he owns a DeLorean was an important part of the promotion of the first book. I remember the posters announcing book-reading events on libraries had the phrase "will be where the DeLorean is parked" under the adress and there was an Easter Egg hunt (apparently there was somekind of secret code in the 1rst edition of the novel) whose 4 winners would get one DeLorean each. In the video announcement of the Easter Egg hunt Cline said "you could win a DeLorean likes the one behind me, but not that one especifically, because its mine"
TBH, CEO's not aware of their customers and destroying the companies future for short term profit is something that happens today, so I can see the IOI doing what the movie shows and he probably would have gotten a fat check for that and retire...
Well, Ready Player One is obviously that Facebook hoped to create with Metaverse. Considering how much money they spent to archive nothing it seems they really need to drain all Earth resources to do that
Youre telling me this multi-million dollar company not only hired trash players to farm but couldn't hire some data miners and hackers? Not only that, they couldnt put a tracker on the kid to lead him to the prize then ban his account and reap the rewards? Am i making too much sense?
I can explain the hackers part. The oasis is an giant vr based internet live service thus its basically impossible to hack it. Its like hacking the whole internet as there are various public, semiprivate and private worlds within
@@orangecat504Attempting to do so probably would get the IOI staff (really don't like the name because that's the same name as the Hitman devs) zeroed out so hard Oasis staff would literally ban them from real life.
You know in hindsight the religious villain from the book of Eli probably should of been the Easter episode
To be fair, the guy was tangientally up against God, working in mysterious ways to be fair, but he was still up against a dude empowered by him.
Shame they didn't want to spend the money on 40k because seeing space marines would have been cool.
Coffee guy becoming company head? Maybe you are familiar with a certain individual know as Kathleen Kennedy
I guess this movie helped embody how communities of players generally can guide a game to a healthier point than a surprising number of companies by their meticulous investment into lore and mechanics.
Generally, as I said. I know a bunvh of metagamers ruin build diversity and then cry about it. Eyesores, they are.
Ideally, you want a company that listens to its players on what makes the game fun to build off of it, but also knows when to ignore them when their suggestions go against the spirit of the game. Helldivers is a good example of that.
You let one group or the other take full control and ignore the other, and it'll go downhill really fast.
What the metaverse showed is how far we are to have any realistic games like the oasis. The book said you can see the entirety of the star wars galaxy, realistic virtual porn, schools, etc.
The villain's plans making Oasis unplayable is stupid, but has much real life precedence.
CEOs of entertainment companies killing the goose that lays the golden eggs is happening a lot.
Sorrento's scheme isn't actually all that terrible. Haliday's egg-hunt had been a big deal for the first few years, but then, when nobody found anything for years, it was largely abandoned by the vast majority of Oasis players.
At that point, IOI had the biggest and most powerful Egg-hunter guild and they were accumulating tons of high-end loot. They might not be the best players (or the best motivated players), but brute force is a superpower all on its own.
After some initial excitement the egg-hunt is largely forgotten and becomes more of an urban legend than anything else. It doesn't really get SERIOUS until Parzival finds the first key. And by that point, IOI has a massive and powerful army, AND an organization of egg scholars that can sift and analyze data.
Any while Parzival and his team are the first to the first two clues, IOI actually gets to the 3rd challenge before anybody else. They also get *close* to winning and only lose because literally the whole Oasis turns against them.
As usual this video was more entertaining than the movie itself.
I never watched the movie. The book was a piece of obnoxiously self-insert fiction where video game God would make you emperor of the world if you were nerdy enough (don't worry, the main character gets good at everything too), and I had no desire to watch the movie after that.
I live for these long drawn out continuous jokes. 😂
At least Sorrento didn't plan to rename the Oasis to _X._
I’m pretty sure the ologist don’t want to find the keys because they completed the quest. They would all be fired immediately.
I also just can't get over how easy the first trial was.
Go backwards? Really?
That was the stumper?
It's like Zealot said, the race has been unwinnable for so long that SOMEONE would have just tried going backwards out of boredom.
Pure oxygen isn't 'toxic' (toxic = poisonous, a poison being a chemical that stops respiration inside cells, causing rapid death of cells and then the organism), but it is a definite health hazard, needing careful management.
On the subject of Nolan having the password on his rig seat, it's probably for administrative functions. Facial recognition would be the default login, once setup, like most people use a finger print or face image to log into their phone, but has a pin or other code for additional setup. And if it's the admin password, that would obviously make sense for Samantha being able to log in regardless of facial recognition.
I am once again asking for the Reaper’s from Mass Effect
I knew it was only a matter of time until you got your hands on this movie 😂
When you were talking about what the oasis represented i knew you read the book. Because the movie did NOT do the oasis justice.
I have literally not heard a single good thing about the sequel novel that was written AFTER the movie came out despite the first book being mad old. The author wrote a cash grab, it was garbage, and Hollywood sees fit to turn it into a movie, so another cash grab. It tracks honestly.
Loved the mention of the kpop girl group IOI in the beginning. They were the first thing that popped into my head when I read the video's title.
I'm always down for anything that rips on Ready Player One! Self-indulgent, "Membah the 80's?" tripe! Good video, Zealot!
0:59 Why would someone wear REAL boxing gloves to virtually box? I get that you want to feel the weight of the gloves, but do you need REAL gloves to do it
3:43 Why does killing off a random line of sixers in the game knock out the same line of them IRL?
5:07 That's what evert player wants to see on their screens, 80% of the screen taken up with random pop up ads. If IOI HAD won the challenge and done this, they'd be out of business in a week, if that. The fact that the pop ups could cause seizures, doesn't even concern him.
6:10 Why are they allowing kids this young to play the game?
12:06 DOES IOI pay their employees? It's established that IOI has a legion of "indentured servants" locked up in their "loyalty centers" being forced to work for them to pay off their "crimes" to IOI.
Well Suicide Squad exists. But in all seriousness ads in games can be non seizure inducing the more realistic version would be to do ad walling (like paywalling but with ads) certain content.
This movie becomes more realistic year after year. Ben Mendelsohn's character is David Zaslav basically, but maybe not as evil as original.
Combined with Merk Zuckerberg
@@WaitWhat-zw2inOr the Elongated Muskrat.
And Jeff Bezroes.
'Memberberries the Movie, made by people who don't understand Video Games.
The book actually had some good game mechanics that was explaned
The cinematography is way worse than I remember: super washed-out color palette mixed with crazy lens flair, uncanny looking CGI and sprinkle some shaky cam in there. Gross.
Actually trying to win the big competition just so he could destroy the Oasis would make the villain into a stealth hero of sorts.
After all, he gets to save the world as part of getting revenge. And even the movie concedes that the damn VR world is basically a 21st century opium den with comparable effects on the real world & its people. If they do make that character change canon then the bad guys weren’t actually too stupid to win, they were sabotaged quite intelligently.
I have a suggestion for an advanced sci-fi civilization that may warrant some scrutiny, the Chozo from Metroid.
For the record I absolutely love the Metroid series, but it's just so funny to me how the Chozo, for being too stubborn to abandon SR388; a planet they could've easily left to live somewhere else; they created the Metroids which ended up indirectly provoking a civil war, a pirate invasion and later the liberation of the X parasite, all of which ended up destroying at the very least 3 Chozo civilizations with the latter putting the entire galaxy at risk.
Now that I think about it the Space Pirates and specially the Galactic Federation did some utterly stupid shenanigans, so an episode on the Metroid series as a whole may be quite substantial.
The reason why sixers are dogsh*t at the game is that IOI doesn't wanna pay them and they get paid from the outside through sabotaging IOI, remember these guys are in a crippling debt.
not ready to play this one sequel, Limited References the Movie One was enough
You should do the syndicate from the xfiles unless he has already done it?
In real life, he goes out into an ohio trailer part with one gun he would get blasted by all sides by the residents
That's what bothered me about that scene; he may have been armed, but, with the amount of people surrounding him, he would've been disarmed and dispatched in seconds.
@LuznoLindo or just straight-up blasted by everybody.
For real. This guy openly refers to it as a "ghetto-trash rat warren," yet not only does he go there with no protection, but no one tries anything? I don't want to sound insensitive, but if this place is so bad - which it seems to be - surely someone would have tried to stab the guy in the suit without even having context just to rob him.
The one thing this movie got right about video games: Corporations will absolutely RUIN a game in the pursuit to make more money.
The only vaguely interesting thing I found in the entire film is Jane Douglas (From Outside Xbox) is one of the sixers (Visible at 14:45). The rest of it just seemed to be ramming pop culture references in the audience's face.
Nice catch.
They filmed in Birmingham, UK. I have a couple of friends who got hoovered up to be extras in the trailer park scenes
The world of _Ready Player One_ should be the subject of a "Sci-Fi Civilizations too stupid to actually exist" video.
"Peak Oil happened, so now everyone lives in giant overstacked trailer parks and spends all day in VR Chat." Bruh, who is doing the farming? Who is doing the mining, the refining, all of the technical work required to make this gamer lifestyle possible? Where are the backup logistics systems? Even if there's no oil anymore, steam locomotives are still perfectly functional as long as you have distilled water and wood, coal, charcoal, or even vegetable oil. And if everyone's playing VR Chat all day, there's still enough of a power grid for electric trams and electric trains, right?
Are any of those questions even relevant to the story?
You know, it would have been awesome to see the first challenge from the book get played out. Watching the hero navigate the Tomb of Horrors only to play a game of Joust against a lich would be absurdly funny to watch, and there's so many ways you could play that up to look epic, then switch briefly to show the two players just playing on arcade machines.
Also it would fit one of the massive plot holes of the movie, it being secretly located on the outskirts of the school
Yess less gooo
I have been playing videogames for more than 30 years, if this movie was aimed at an specific audience it will be me, but I found it so painfully dumb, it is just a bunch of videogame references that someone who does not know anything about gaming just put together.
*The protagonist is completely unlikable.
*The romantic relationship is there just because he is a man and the other character is a girl.
*The villain decides to wear a suit that can make you feel PAIN on a game, imagine how moronic that is.
*Everyone is from the same city eventhough they are playing online.
I mean if I could land a job where making NO PROGRESS would continue to pay check and completing my task meant my job was OVER? I wouldnt actually finish anything. Why would I?
The race in the movie was one of the stupidest things to have done with an even dumber solution. Whoever came up with that has never watched people play online before. If all you have to do is reverse at full speed, that was solved day 1.
At least in the book, it took a lot of information about Haliday and people paying very specific attention to areas that weren't likely to be explored, and it took skills and knowledge of a DnD module and an ancient at the time arcade cabinet.
Plus, maybe I'm just still grouchy about not getting the Tomb of Horrors on the big screen...
The problem I have with video game movies is how clear the disconnect is between filmmakers, writers, directors , and those who actually play video games as a passion.
These stories will often only reference other games but nobody looks at the industry as a whole, what gamers like and don’t like in video games, and how to make a story around common modern tropes. Many of these stories also have extremely unreasonable consequences for dying in the game. Ready player one resets your progress, spy kids 3D is a permanent ban. Sword art online of course, “you die in the game, you die for real,”
How about a story where whenever you die, you either need to pay a micro transaction to respawn or wait a long amount time? It’s an extreme consequence for dying but ties into something many players relate to and hate dealing with.
i know its not the case, but i like to consider this crap movie an intentional parody of modern hollywood, massivly bloated, devoid of creative thought and dependant on sucking the life from old ips reliant on fanbases they utterly and openly hate....
Spielberg is jewish afterall
If it was a parody, it missed the casting couch part of it.
No, Ernest Cline the author of the book is just a weirdo with an unhealthy obsession with 80s nostalgia.