The State of Play: Geektopia in Ready Player One

Abstract

Abstract:The paper looks at the figure of the "geek" in popular culture, and especially in Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One, also with a view towards the forthcoming adaptation directed by Steven Spielberg. Tracing the contours of the geek imaginary, the paper looks at its inscription in popular culture, political economy, it explores nostalgia as an enabling force, modes of community, sociability and socialization, building toward the unlikely concept of "geektopia."

Machphrasis: Towards a Poetics of Video Games in Contemporary Literary Culture

“…Unlike point one's often proleptic function, by relying on some presumed commonality in a reader's past the first aspect of point two is generally analeptic, trading on a nostalgic past when video games and gaming were sub-cultural artefacts and activities. However, nostalgia is just as much a forgetting as a remembering, as Rares Moldovan (2017) knew of Ready Player One . Nostalgic writers reveal a great deal about their views on the present, and laying claim to video gaming's misremembered past can produce false utopian futures that exclude in both temporal directions, as Ready Player One does.…”