Steven Spielberg's film portrays video gamers at their worst Alfie Bown

Steven Spielberg's new blockbuster, Ready Player One, is the most significant Hollywood depiction of gamer culture to date. For the first time in mainstream cinema, it presents video games not merely as the cliched subcultural world of geeks and nerds, but as a significant force shaping the future of entertainment, communication, love, and politics. In this way, it does justice to the importance of video games, which have an increasing role in social and cultural life. As such, the celebrated director is showing the worst side of gamer culture. The movie adapts Ernest Cline's 2012 novel, in which "most of the human race spend all of their free time inside a video game" powerful enough to transform "entertainment, social networking and even global politics".