Do yourself a favor and get Ready Player One!

A statement often heard from people who liked Ernest Cline’s book Ready Player One is, “it’s like it was written with me in mind”. And indeed, if you were young in the 80ies and grew up with the movies and videogames of that time you will really enjoy this book.

Ernest Cline showcases that he’s an 80ies pop-culture buff in this book telling the story of Wade, a teenager in 2044, using the immensely popular virtual reality universe OASIS to escape the grim economic and ecologic situation most of the world’s population finds itself in.

Like many others Wade is searching for the ultimate Easter eggs hidden somewhere in the multitude of virtual worlds designed by Halliday, the creator of OASIS, who died heirless several years earlier. Halliday inspired himself on what was supposedly the first ever Easter egg, hidden in the Atari 2600 game Adventure. Atari at that time didn’t allow their designers to put their names in the credits of the games, so unbeknownst to Atari, Warren Robinett, the designer of Adventure, hid a block of 1×1 pixel in one of the catacombs which when picked up and brought to a specific place opened up a chamber where when walked into, the room displayed ”Created by Warren Robinett”.

The book starts with Halliday, just after his death, revealing to the world in a dramatic video that he hid clues in OASIS and the first one to find all 5 keys would inherit his fortune.

If like me you lived through the 80ies, do yourself a favor and get Ready Player One.

Crowdfunding the arts

Crowdsourcing seems to have become a bit a word of the past, so move over and welcome the new hot thing Crowdfunding. Instead of asking people to do things, we’re now asking them to just pay for it.

Crowdfunding in and off itself is really nothing new, we’ve been doing this all over the world already for many year, except we have been using words like “charity” or “IPO” for it. The new thing is that we’re now using the same mechanisms for all kinds of activities, from creation of software, printing boardgames, translating books, making music and even producing movies.  The formulas are as varied as the projects you can fund. But it has taken off with such success that the concept itself has now become the business model of many a start-up or new business initiative.

And recently it seems to have become a very viable and popular way to get creative and artistic projects off the ground.

Here in Belgium we’ve already been doing this for quite a while with the very commendable SonicAngel platform giving a way for new and unknown talent to get their music out there thanks to direct fan funding.

Kickstarter.com is a platform where you can fund creative projects and even very easily present your own project.

And soon we will see Iron Sky, a crowdfunded Sci Fi movie about Nazi’s on the moon, looking to cover 900.000 € of their budget with crowd investments.

I guess it’s mainly because everybody on the one hand can identify more easily with such projects, they’re easy to grasp, and see the relation between the money and the result. And on the other hand people feel a strong connection with the subject at hand. Whatever the reason, I like the model and I also guess like many people it fills me with a sort of pride probably felt by the historic maecenas to be a part of the success of a struggling artist…