Ready Player None
Just a small thought for today, but I thought it was ironically twisted and undermining the message of the story when Ready Player One collaborated not once, but twice with Roblox to promote their movies.
It's just weird how a novel and subsequent film adaptation, where the moral of the story is to create meaning in existence outside of the internet, would collaborate with a children's MMO all about creating a virtual third space because capitalism doesn't like to foster those spaces for people (hence why everyone lives in stacks upon stacks of shipping containers, a detail I overlooked on my only viewing of the film at 14 but apparently something that stuck out to me since then). All while using a financially-incentivized system that ends up preying on children, especially with brightly-colored buttons redirecting players to buy gamepasses on some of the most popular games.
You can go ahead and say that it's ironic that I would post something critiquing Ready Player One's collab with Roblox online given my reasoning, but I feel like it needs to be said.
This post was brought to mind thanks to seeing my mom watch The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. I remembered that they were another book adaptation that did a collab with Roblox and I just thought it was very strange. Do children even know what the original The Hunger Games trilogy is about? I remember watching the first two film adaptations when I was 10 years old and being pretty unfazed (ironic, considering the novels are commentary on the desensitization to watching violence on the news). Then, at 11 years old, I watched The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part I in theaters, and was deeply unsettled by the depictions of PTSD in the end of the first film, even. Considering that this was during my first year of middle school, I realize now that I was unsettled because deep down I knew years down the road that I would be experiencing symptoms of PTSD myself.
It’s just that it’s not something that’s ever talked about when you’re a child unless it’s in the context of trauma in military soldiers. Not even in the civilians who live in terror during war. Soldiers. How ignorant to believe that PTSD is only something experienced after fighting in a war.
Anyway. Another can of worms where someone might think I was reading too much into it.
P.S. If I was a parent I would never let my kids play Roblox. For reasons beyond this but some of the collabs and excessive marketing to vulnerable, impressionable youth isn’t helping either. Big Corporate needs to keep its greasy hands off my (hypothetical) kids.