I’ve been suffering a little bit of a malaise this year, kind of a combination of commitments weighing too heavily on me and feeling a little old. In short I was getting a little tired of the old gaming. It was starting to feel like another commitment, and I’m way too lazy to increase my all ready full plate. If an activity is not enjoyable or not required, I’m unlikely to do it.

Then, on my son Cameron’s recommendation, I read Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. It’s a novel about, amongst other things, gaming. It's not too much a stretch to say it's probably the best representation of the idiosyncrasies of gaming in fiction ever put to paper.

Far in the future the world is hooked on the OASIS, the virtual reality experience we’ve been dreaming of since Tron, a giant interactive universe containing worlds dedicated to games, movies, books, companies, countries and a hundred other things. It’s like a fully interactive version of Second Life where you can play any game, watch any movie, or listen to any music from history.

The book opens with the creator of the OASIS, James Halliday, broadcasting his video will to the whole world. The reclusive Howard Hawks like super genius is also the richest man in the world. He’s decided to hide the key to his riches in the OASIS as an Easter Egg. A hidden artefact that requires the completion of three gates, opened with three keys, to access. This becomes the biggest competition in the history of the world as millions begin hunting for the egg; constantly checking the online coin up arcade based score board to see if anyone has yet attained a score. After five years most people have given up, assuming the egg is either impossible to find or that there was no egg in the first place.

Then one day a kid from the ghetto, Wade Watts, finds the copper key, and opens the first gate. Then everything changes. Ready Player One is the story of Wade, known by his Oasis ID Parzival, and what happens to him while searching for Halliday’s egg.

Despite being a future set science fiction story many plot elements are delightfully retro. The character Halliday was obsessed with computer games and the 80’s and most of the puzzles and challenges in the game have to do with 80’s pop culture lore, John Hughes films, coin up arcade games and classic Dungeons and Dragons modules. This makes Ready Player One a gleeful nostalgic ride not only for geeks, but for old geeks like me.

It’s also, as I said before, one of the best novels about gaming ever written. It perfectly epitomizes everything that’s great and garbage about being a gamer. One of the best elements of the book is its accessibility; Cameron, who’s 13 and far too young to even get half the references, loved it, because it’s not only a nostalgic love letter for the 80’s and the early halcyon days of geekery, but because it’s also classic cyberpunk science fiction with a futurist look at a world crippled by pollution and overpopulation that’s so broken people prefer logging into their virtual playgrounds than trying to fix it. Not that the book is sanctimonious or preachy about its bleak future world, the focus is always on Wade who spends more time than most people online looking for the first key.

If you’re any stripe of gamer or any stripe of geek Ready Player One is right up your alley. I highly recommend you read it.

If nothing else it’ll remind you why you love games so much. It certainly reminded me.