As Kishonna L. Gray notes, there is a pervasive cultural script of gaming culture that holds whiteness and masculinity at its center. This cultural script is upheld by marketing, character creation, narrative inclusions and exclusions, storylines, and more. Ready Player One, inspired in part by knight-poet Wolfram von Eschenbach's thirteenth-century German Arthurian romance Parzival, is a 2011 novel by Ernest Cline with a subsequent 2018 movie adaptation directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Cline and Zack Penn. As intellectual property, the backbone of Ready Player One and the entire basis of its plot revolve around late twentieth-century nerd-core gaming culture, including and exceeding its cultural scripts.

Ready Player One is also, as scholars like Susan Aronstein, Jason Thompson, Kevin Moberly, and Brent Moberly point out, fundamentally structured by Arthurian romance. Both the novel and the film follow a white teenage boy named Wade Watts. In a dystopian near-future characterized by economic turmoil, mass inequality, and environmental collapse, Wade, like most people on earth, spends as much time as possible in the OASIS, the “Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation” (48). A video-game designer named James Halliday created the OASIS, “a massively multiplayer online game that […] gradually evolved into the globally networked virtual reality most of humanity now used on a daily basis” (1). With no heirs, on the day of his death Halliday released a video challenging the OASIS's population – virtually everyone on earth – to embark on a Grail Quest to find the Easter Egg that will give them Halliday's fortune and ownership rights to the OASIS. This Grail Quest is a series of in-depth interactive puzzles within OASIS that are highly informed by Halliday's personal infatuation with 1980s nerd and gamer culture; his tastes, by virtue of their pervasiveness in his creation, the OASIS, have dictated the tastes of billions of others.

Along with this Egg Hunt/Grail Quest, Halliday releases a personal diary chronicling his favorite texts, his “canon” (40), as a clue for the questers trying to find the Egg-Grail. When this worldwide Grail Quest begins within OASIS, Wade builds an avatar who, in the movie, has digitally exaggerated white skin, and he chooses the username Parzival, “after the knight of Arthurian legend who found the Holy Grail” (28).