Gamers of the World Unite!: Gamification and Governmentality in Ready Player One and For the Win

My chapter for the edited collection Ready Reader One that I am putting together with Dr. Mike Sell.<br><br>At first glance, Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011) appears to be a novel about the very sort of utopian gamified world that McGonigal predicts, a fable about the liberatory<br>potential of gamification. The book chronicles the adventures of Wade Watts, a teenager living in a not-so-distant future where a virtual world called the OASIS has become the primary place of business and leisure escape for a whole in turmoil. When the creator of the OASIS, an eccentric game designer named James Halliday, passes away and promises to leave ownership of his company to the gamer who can find the location of an Easter Egg hidden somewhere within his vast virtual world, an evil corporation called IOI makes it their mission to win his final game by any means necessary. Luckily, Wade and his fellow gamers are able to win out over their corporate opponents by using their gaming skills and th