Ready Player One Ch. 0005 24:00 Mrs. Bly Eng 4

No Journal today! Welcome to the 1980s! Part of the “The Holy Triology”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rQSJDLM8ZE

Ogden Morrow Halliday wanted to play Dungeon & Dragons but he didn’t have any friends Ogden Morrow noticed what he was reading and invited him to his house to play it “There, in Morrow’s basement, Halliday was introduced to an entire group of ‘mega geeks’ just like himself. They immediately accepted him as one of their own, and for the first time in his life, James Halliday had a circle of friends” (53). Later, Morrow became HALLIDAY’S BUSINESS PARTNER

Anorak’s Quest Halliday created his first videogame at 15 years old! It was called Anorak’s Quest Name from: Anorak was his favorite D& D character Programmed in BASIC on TRS-80 Color Computer Adventure game takes place in Chthonia (based off his Dungeons and Dragons campaign) Solid them 5 ¼ inch floppy disc in plastic Ziploc bags

Halliday as a Person “Halliday had many well-known obsessions” (55). “(Several exhaustive psychological studies were done on Halliday following his death, and his obsessive adherence to rountine and preoccupation with a few obscure areas of interest led many psychologists to conclude that Halliday suffered from Asperger’s syndrome, or from some other form of high-functioning autism” (55) “The games he created were addictive and wildly popular” (55).

Gregarious Games The name of the videogame company that Ogden Morrow and James Halliday created In 1990 Gregarious Games moved into a “real office” in a strip mall in Columbus, Ohio “In December 2012, Gregarious Games rebranded itself as Gregarious Simulation Systems, and under this new banner they launched their flagship product…OASIS” (56).

OASIS is an ESCAPE Referred to as an “Open-source reality” (57) It was free! You could create yourself an entirely new persona “You could change your name, age, sex, race, height, weight, voice, hair color, and bone structure. OR you could cease being human altogether, and become an elf, ogre, alien, or any other creature from literature, movies, or mythology” (57)

What is latency? Latency= dormat; not active OLD systems: “If too many people were logged in at the same time, the simulation would slow to a crawl and avatars would freeze in midstride as the system struggled to keep up” (58). NEW OASIS “utilized a new kind of fault-tolerant server array that could draw additional processing power from every computer connected to it…could handle up to 5 million simultaneous users [at the time of the launch]” (58).

OASIS Account & Shopping GSS “only charged a onetime sign-up fee of TWENTY-FIVE CENTS, for which you received a lifetime OASIS account” (59). During the recession, OASIS allowed people to SHOP! See pages 59-60 ! “The OASIS became such an integral part of people’s day-to-day social lives that users were more than willing to shell out real money to buy accessories for their avatars: clothing, furniture, houses, flying cars, magic swords, and machine guns” (59)

Ch. 0005 SQs 1. Who is Ogden Morrow? 2. What is Anorak’s Quest and where did the name come from? 3. What did psychologists conclude about Halliday’s eccentricities? 4. Explain how the OASIS helped people “escape the drudgery of your day-to-day life.” 5. How could the OASIS handle five million users without latency? 6. How much does it cost to sign up for an OASIS account? 7. Explain how the OASIS allowed Americans to engage in their favorite pastime: shopping. (what did they shop for?)