Offline Games
In Ready Player One, there are hundreds of references made retro video games such as Pac-Man, Zork, and many Nintendo games.
These older video game references are another way offline games make use of communication. These memorable moments in games make people remember them. This is similar to communicating those secrets found to friends and coworkers (or random strangers on the internet), but it is used in a different way.
This allows players to refer to a moment in older games and relate it to something in a new game. For example, in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the development team hid many easter eggs or references to the games they had previously made to keep their legacy alive and to tell players something about the background of the world simply through referencing a memorable moment from a previous game.
Photo by Ben Ayers
Even offline games involve communication in some ways.
It used to be that gamers would communicate experiences from most video game to friends or coworkers at school or work. They'd speak with their friends and tell tales of this rare item they found and where they found it, some epic boss battle, or their opening experience to the game. Some of this was could be reproduced and provided a way to tell others how to get an item or complete a quest, for example.
This still happens even now to a degree, but gamers also have another way to do this: the internet. Because offline games have no way of interacting with other players within the game, gamers still turn to online sources to share their stories.
Places like the official forums of a game, reddit, and other fan websites or blogs are all places for this. Below is a sample of this type of communication.
