The pleasures and perils of nostalgia & reference, the importance of identifying real play versus gamified labor, and whether the internet used to be fun: Matthew Leggat of the Utopian & Dystopian Fictions podcast joins to discuss Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One.

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• Guest: Matthew Leggatt
• Title: Ready Player One by Ernie Cline
• Host:Jake Casella Brookins
• Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork byRob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• ARB’s Fundraiser!!!
• Matthew’s Cultural and Political Nostalgia in the Age of Terror, Play in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, and Wastelands and Wonderlands
• The Utopian & Dystopian Fictions podcast
• I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
• Chicano Frankenstein by Daniel A. Olivas
• U&DF episode with Olivas
• Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash & Reamde
• William Gibson’s Neuromancer
• K.A. Teryna’s Black Hole Heart translated by Alex Shvartsman
• Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenya’s Chain Gang All-Stars
• Was It Yesterday: Nostalgia in Contemporary Film and Television edited by Matthew
• Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code
• Gamergate
• “Playing the Game of Literature: Ready Player One, the Ludic Novel, and the Geeky ‘Canon’ of White Masculinity” by Megan Amber Condis
• Captain Crunch: phreaker John Draper
• Kyle Chayka’s "Why the internet isn't fun anymore"
• William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum”
• Ling Ma's Severance
• Helen MacDonald & Syn Blaché’s Prophet
• MacDonald’s H is for Hawk
• Stanislaw Lem's Solaris
• Alice Landsberg's Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture
• The television series Stranger Things
• Mark Fisher's Ghosts of My Life
• Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (based on Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room!) & Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb
• Samuel Butler’s Erewhon
• B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two
• Voight-Kampf Test from Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner / Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• The "lusory attitude" from Bernard Suits' The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia
• Ernst Callenbach's Ecotopia
• Philip Nel’s “I Love the ‘80s: Dystopia, Nostalgia, and Ready Player One”
• Michael Jackson
• 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back
• (That's Mike Nelson of MST3K Fame)
• High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
• Jordan Carroll's Speculative Whiteness
• Paul Hardisty'sForcing trilogy