The Search for Significance in Ready Player One

Obviously, calling Halliday’s prize an “Easter Egg” need not be tinged with spiritual significance. Secrets in video games—and by extension, those in other arenas of entertainment—have been called Easter eggs for decades. They’re secrets, jusdt like a painted egg in a houseplant pot is a secret..

But given its explicit connection to the Grail legends, The word “Easter” in Ready Player One’s Easter egg can take on greater power. The quest in the movie isn’t just a quest for fortune and control. In fact, that’s quite secondary. It’s a quest for meaning. And redemption.

The videogames of my childhood—the very 8-bit and 16-bit videogames to which Ready Player One pays homage to—rarely had any end point. You’d play and play and play until the game got the better of you or you just got sick of it and left.

I remember that I got really, really good at one of those games. One afternoon, I played it for an hour—really an eternity back then. But the opponents just kept coming. And suddenly, I realized with a little bit of existential horror, that they were never going to stop. And it struck me: it was just like life. You play and play and play until, eventually, you lose. Or you give up.

Except that that’s not true. Not for Christians, anyway. We have a secret out of that existential trap—a secret back door. An Easter egg, if you will. Life is hard; we understand that. But we believe it has meaning, too. That, like Ready Player One’s Parzival, we’re working toward a worthy goal. A treasure. And that treasure is intrinsically tied to our relationship with our own Creator.

We haven’t beaten the game, of course. But then again, we didn’t have to. Jesus did it for us.

In Ready Player One, we realize that Parzival and his friends aren’t so much seeking the egg for the egg’s sake, but rather what lies behind the egg.: Meaning. Purpose. Salvation. And what proves to be that salvation? An understanding that what gives life real meaning lies outside the OASIS. Parzival—Wade, rather—finds love out there. Friendship. Purpose beyond a high score.

I think the same could be said for us, trapped as we are in our own games, be they virtual or not. We work like crazy to get ahead. We lose ourselves in artificial pleasures. We forget the meaning that lies all around us and the meaning that lies beyond us.

Ready Player One’s quest for an Easter egg reminds of that ultimate meaning. But Easter itself does, too. It reminds us that, as important as our petty concerns may feel in this fallen world of ours, there’s a greater, more glorious reality that lies beyond. And we’ve already been given the keys.