“Ready Player One” is the worst thing nerd culture ever produced
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The questions he's raising with the book as a springboard have to do with "fandom" in general and how and why it exists as it is. And what's wrong with it. And while I think this author is pretty self-indulgent in the way he writes, too, I think the point at the heart of it is a good one--'cause there is a lot wrong with it.
Actually, it's quite easy to account for it: not everyone has the same tastes as you.
Or if Titanic, to deliberately pick a movie that's not gonna win the hearts of many film snobs anyway, had had every single shot nigh-comically misframed, weird scene transitions right in the middle of significant speech or actions, a CG Titanic that occasionally floated above and out of the water for no obvious reason, extras playing all the speaking roles, and so on, had still performed just as well and been popular among ordinary audiences, who betrayed, in interviews, no apparent awareness that the film was totally and obviously messed up in fundamental ways that ruined any kind of story or message it may have been trying to convey. But that actually happens sometimes with books. And then the critics go "wait... what? Did you... actually read it? It's very, very bad. I mean, you did notice that, right?" and the fans say "you just hate fun! Get your head out of the clouds! People like different things!" It's very confusing.
Actually, now that I think about it, maybe this happens with books and not with movies because movies—especially those with any hope of popular success—pull you through the story rather by the nose, so it's more jarring when they entirely fail than when a book does. Maybe some people are so much better than me at getting lost in books that they're seamlessly replacing dialog, entire paragraphs of text, whole scenes, plot lines even, with things that don't suck, not even realizing they're doing it. I guess that'd explain it, if they're unconsciously live-fanfictioning the thing in their head to make it better.
The only NYT bestseller in recent years that comes close to your Titanic analogy is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a book that sold on its title alone and which I would not be surprised to learn not a single person has read, including the author. Most successful books of the stripe you're describing are more like a singlecamera situation comedy--they stick to a basic but largely innocuous set of prose conventions that won't win awards but allows the author to focus their efforts on elements their audience cares more about.
However, having participated in read-alouds from Fifty Shades for the LULZ, I'd dispute its being good for any purpose other than comedy. No, not even that purpose. Those scenes are some of the worst of an already hilariously bad lot, reading as if they were written by someone with a weak vocabulary describing LEGO set instruction manuals. They'd be unacceptable as free Internet writing of the sort (ahem, one supposes). They're damn funny though.
> The only NYT bestseller in recent years that comes close to your Titanic analogy is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a book that sold on its title alone and which I would not be surprised to learn not a single person has read, including the author.
A friend of mine read and enjoyed it, in fact, though he likes (some) bad fiction in a haha-I-can't-believe-this-got-published sort of way. He's also the one who got us in to the reading-aloud-from-Fifty-Shades activity.
Well, they started as Twilight fanfic...
Geekdom is becoming more popular in popular culture, but RP1 does it in a special way that I can appreciate. The Big Bang Theory does standard sitcom stuff and plays a laugh-track when recognizable "geeky" thing happens like a character having a Nintendo 64 on-screen for a moment. RP1 has an infodump about an easter egg and a glitch in a specific arcade game (... not entirely different than some of the type of nonfiction I like) and then works it into a contrived but fun plot point. It paints a world where many characters are driven by obsession, and that this isn't a spectacularly weird thing they do. (Yes, the book does take it to some amusing extremes.) Maybe it's the likely asperger's syndrome in me talking, but I feel like obsession is a big thing in my life, and it's fun to find a story that actually embraces that.
Yes, I know that the way the character often interacts by trivia-dropping is grating outside of scenarios where trivia saves the world, and possibly still a bit grating within those scenarios. I never thought those parts were being portrayed otherwise. Yes, there's common problems with fandoms about gatekeeping and lack of inclusion, and no, I don't think it's unforgivable that RP1 doesn't address these. RP1's popularity is not a dismissal by society of these issues.
No, I never thought it would be a good idea for human culture to stop creating new media and cling to 80's stuff, or felt like the book pushed for that at all. Maybe others read it differently, but I figured that the setting was like that just so the book could focus on 80s nostalgia specifically with no other media to get in the way while also having futuristic VR.
Yeah, it's trash, but trash can be fun! I think getting out of your head and just enjoying something is important without needing to critically analyze it. It seems this book was pretty polarizing, like The Last Jedi.
Incidentally, I think it's fair to describe The Last Jedi's polarizing effect as having very different causes from something like RP1.
The Ayn Rand comparison seems off the mark, because while they may have been embraced by a segment of nerd culture, they are not products of that culture.