In the film, Ready Player One, there is a constant contrast between the current reality of the year 2045 and their virtual reality. The state of their current reality has become second thought. Everyone makes their entire world revolve around “The Oasis”, their virtual reality. The advancement in technology shown through the Oasis makes it hard to believe that their actual living conditions are so poor and slum-like. In the virtual reality, everything from automobiles to clothing to buildings is futuristic and sleek, while everything in the real world is made of scraps and is damaged. This divide shows a different side to cyberpunk, which often focuses on the combination of low-life and high tech.
In the actual reality, the main character, Wade Watts, lives in an area of Columbus, Ohio called "The Stacks". The homes in this
area are made up of trailers, shipping containers, and other small forms stacked on top of one another in order to create skyscraper-like structures. This shows how cities still maintain condensed populations in the future, but money for buildings is low and the need for aesthetics is obsolete. People have put all of their money and effort into their lives in the Oasis, rather than focusing on their needs in the real world. The technology has taken over everyone’s way of living and has caused a halt in actual innovation. Homes have become more of an unwanted necessity rather than being a place of self expression and comfort. Peoples’ lives are barely spent in the environment around them, so why would they care about what their homes look like without any pressure from society?
In their virtual reality, anything that you can imagine can seemingly come to life. Since people spend most of their lives in the Oasis, they put everything that they have into it and make it their own desired reality. The Oasis shows what the optimal cyberpunk future would be like, with major technological advancements, neon lighting, holograms, and sleek architectural design. Everything shown is visually stimulating and draws the viewer in. Within the Oasis, the built environment ranges from futuristic cyberpunk style to retro designs, and even fictional designs found in movies.
The slum-like living conditions shown in the film helps to put into perspective how now, in the year 2020, we are becoming lost in our own technologies and forgetting about the world around us. This cyberpunk dystopian future shows how society is so lost in their desired reality, that they forget how to live and function within their daily lives in the real world. The path that we are currently going down is leading to something similar with how much we rely on technology in our day to day lives. This leads to how we also use technology to escape our current reality with things such as video games, social media, and television. Technology is already starting to destroy our society because of the way that we use it. Everyone relies too heavily on technology and they do not have any boundaries with it, so just going one step further by losing ourselves in other forms of technology could set this possible dystopian future in motion. The divide between actual reality and virtual reality shown in Ready Player One alludes to how we are headed down a path of destruction if we keep our focus on our technologies rather than our real lives.
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