5 YAs for Fans of Ready Player One

Ready Player One plants us in a dystopian 2044, where young gamer Wade Watts spends most of his time traversing an omnipresent virtual utopia, OASIS. In a whole new take on the quest novel, the narrative gets a jolt when it’s revealed that the late creator of OASIS has left an Easter Egg of sorts in the game, the finder of which will inherit his massive estate. As Wade and others search for the keys to unlock the egg, Wade is treated to challenge after challenge derived from ’80s pop culture and video games—and a fair few people who’d kill him to reach the egg first.
Recently, one of the crown princes of 1980s cinema stepped forward to burst a lot of fangirl blood vessels: Steven Spielberg will be directing Ready Player One‘s big-screen adaptation, and while it’ll be a long wait yet for the cinematic version, there are a whole bunch of YAs ready to sate your gaming fiction thirst. Here are just a few.

Erebos, by Ursula Poznanski
Remember when we were only concerned about board games trying to kill us? Ah, those halcyon days of old. The titular Jumanji Erebos is an enigmatic computer game that falls into the hands of 16-year-old Nick. Much like Fight Club, Erebos has some important rules: always play alone, never talk about the game, and don’t tell anyone your nickname. As teenage boys are wont to do, Nick quickly becomes hooked on this immersive game, until it all gets a little too sinister. When Nick finally disobeys one of Erebos’s alarming commands, he’s booted from the game—and engulfed in a mystery of who’s really behind this controlling virtual reality. Think about all this the next time you lock one of your Sims in a room with no doors, you monster.

Epic, by Conor Kostick
If you imagine Earth governed by the actions taken in World of Warcraft, you’ll have a good starting mindset for Kostick’s Avatar Chronicles series, the first book of which is Epic. The eponymous Epic is a virtual fantasy game, yet so much more. On New Earth, life—from income to social class—is governed by Epic gameplay, a tool to keep violence out of real-world society by stockpiling it in a darned violent video game. Want to get into college? Better get to playing, son. In this epically (sorry, not sorry) unequal world, we meet Eric, out to avenge the lot of his downtrodden parents by subverting the rules of the game. Surprisingly, by spiting the rules and making his avatar a perfectly unique snowflake, he may have just stumbled on a way to bring down the game itself.

Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow
In his scarily realistic, 1984-esque story, Doctorow illustrates the newest reason for you not to leave your home: “Wrong MMORPG, wrong time.” In the aftermath of a terrorist attack on San Francisco, Marcus Yallow, a 17-year-old hacker extraordinaire, and his friends happen to be performing some real-life quests for their online role-playing game in the same area. Hauled in by the Department of Homeland Security and interrogated, they’re finally released—well, all but one of them. In the process of locating their missing friend and their missing civil liberties, Marcus and co. attempt to turn the tables on Big Brother by harnessing the power of their virtual networks. So just a lighthearted romp, really.

In Real Life, by Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang
Having fully explored the dangers of games that consume real life, let us turn to another Doctorow story, which probes the dilemma of the nastiness of reality invading a virtual escape. This adorably illustrated graphic novel introduces Coarsegold Online, a hugely popular MMPORG that I wish I could play right now. (If Rainbow Rowell can give us Carry On, the world can make a real Coarsegold Online happen.) Anywho…Anda has fallen in love with Coarsegold because she gets to be what she doesn’t feel she is in real life: a badass hero. It also opens up some friend doors, until complications set in. Anda befriends a young Chinese gamer who farms the game for valuable objects and sells them to players from well-to-do countries who can afford them. It’s against the rules, but does that matter when we’re talking about real livelihoods? That question provides a little rain in Anda’s Eden.

Guy in Real Life, by Steve Brezenoff
If you fell in love with Ready Player One for its enthusiastic embrace of all things nerdy, then behold Guy in Real Life, which is just as charmingly absorbed in its own geek cachet. Lesh and Svetlana are two teens who, through divine providence, accidentally crash into one another. So smitten is he that he creates a new character modeled after Svetlana in an online role-playing game, as his real-life relationship with her develops. An interesting dichotomy emerges between the two tracks—until they collide in a mushroom cloud of questions on identity and the roles we play.