Ethical Reflection on Ready Player One

Morrow wrote in his autobiography that he’d left GSS because ... he felt that the OASIS had evolved into something horrible. “It had become a self-imposed prison for humanity,” he wrote. “A pleasant place for the world to hide from its problems while human civilization slowly collapses, primarily due to neglect.” (p. 120)

(Halliday speaking) “I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn’t know how to connect with people there. I was afraid, for all of my life. Right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.” (p. 364)

• Do you agree with the two previous quotations?

Yes, through the whole book, the characters talk about how they use OASIS to get through the difficulties or inconformities of their lifes. Wade openly discuss how he does not enjoy his life, he thinks it's horrible and he finds preferible to be at OASIS at any hour.

In other hand, Hache, Art3mis, Shoto and Daito use OASIS to overpass their inconformities, for example, Hache designed her character as her mother told her, hiding that she was a black girl, to avoid the discrimination. If we analyze this, we can see that she is attempting to avoid her reality, she's living a fake life, as another person (not a black girl). Instead of working for equality between humanity, the issues are easier to hide themselfs in OASIS

Art3mis designed her character almost exactly as her real image, but avoided to add what she thought was an ugly characteristic. Again, this is an example of a person trying to overpass their "inconformities" instead of accepting them

Daito and Shoto were boys that left their society in order to be inside OASIS as much as possible, they left their real lives, and prefered to live to fake life, not as themselfs.

As Morrow and Halliday said, OASIS become the place where everyone scaped to avoid to feel the terryfing and painful true of the world, to place that enabled everyone to stop fighting to find solutions.

• Do you personally see any virtues in a system like the OASIS?

Yes, the system actually enabled everyone to access a lot of informatin, know a lot of palces and eras, the whole system as a conjution of a lot of functionalities to access knowledge, explore places, know people. In synthesis, the system enabled humanity to do things in a simplier way and cheaper.

• Do you think that there are any similarities between the OASIS and the way we currently use IT technology (computers, game consoles, smart phones, etc.) and social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.)?

Yes, as I said before, the system enabled the users to access knowledge (as computers), get fun (as consoles and games), and communicate with others (smatphones, social networks). And in a bad way, the system and the gadgets previously mentioned enabled users to hide themselfs behind fake "information", because the social networks allow us to show to other what we want to allow them to see

In conclusion, I enjoyed this book, this is the second time I read it, but this is the first time I try to analyze the content. If we look close to the context of the history, we can find a broken world, with a great tool, but lazy and not inspired to improve of their world. After the launch of OASIS, it seems like the whole humanity stopped worrying about anything. They just focused on improving OASIS and the way they intect with it.