/hobby/ - Hobby

watched ready player one with the family today.

it was okay, not as super obnoxious references as I expected. but, overall the plot was a bit miserable, basically the whole world has retreated into the virtual game due to the world being terrible late capitalist hell where 'people have given up trying to solve our problems', and the heroes struggle to inherit control of the virtual world from its creator instead of letting an evil corporation take it, at the end they just decide to control the game themselves as a group and 'the game will be closed on tuesdays and thursdays because reality is real'. also the game is like totally pay to win and addiction forming obviously, which they don't do anything about

I mean geeze they could have at least signed the game over to the community as a co-op or something, be a little more radical, especially since they rallied the community to help them at the end and a bunch of them died (permadeath item loss), then just became a monarchy.

But I guess that would require liberals to actually think democracy and popular control is desirable. The idea of 'virtuous elites' is pretty deeply entrenched. On the other hand, at least they ended debt slavery where the evil corporation would use people as gold farmers in the game, so it's pretty radical, for the late 1800s. Guess liberalism has never moved past that point so it fits.