READY PLAYER ONE As a Film Metaverse An Ontological Study

In this study, it is ontologically examined to what extent Steven Spielberg's READY PLAYER ONE, the film adaptation of Ernest Cline's novel of the same name, can be considered as a film metaverse, i.e. a metaverse which can be manifested through the mediality of the film. Digital cinema has no ontological status of its own, as Manovich puts it, due to its lack of indexicality to reality. Rather, there is only a methodological alternative of re-mediating other media. Therefore, the already realized metaverse by the novel gets itself again to be mediated by digital cinema. The difference between the two in the fusion of reality and virtuality reflects the medial difference. On the one hand, the novel by Cline builds the storytelling of time through the expansion of digital games in the narrative dimension. It is attempted to make the metaverse anthropocentric through the adventure of ‘awakening’ the game-literacy from the past. On the other hand, the film by Spielberg is spatialized through spectacle and as the result, ludus is highlighted as the performative dimension of the gameness. To what extent the inter-operability between the game spirit of the OASIS and the experienced game literacy of the protagonists, suggested in the film adaptation by Spielberg, can be acknowledged as a successful version of metaverse, remains, in the end, an open question. Despite the ontological ambiguity, the novel Ready Player One and the movie of the same name offer splendid practical topics for discussion.