In Ready Player One, How do Wade Owen Watts and the other Gunters have enough time to learn all the 80's stuff?

Wade Owen Watts is only 18 when Ready Player One takes place. He also attends school. Yet he somehow has enough time to memorize everything in James Halliday's atlas!

Not only is he super-amazing at every 80's videogame he's ever played, he also is outstanding in every TV show of the 80's, knows every book, knows every band and even memorized every movie so much so that he can verbally recite Wargames from memory!

How did Watts possibly have time for all this?

Answer

He spent 5 years doing this, double-full-time.

Over the past five years, I’d downloaded every single movie, TV show, and cartoon mentioned in Anorak’s Almanac. (Level One, 0001)

As in, probably 8-9 hours a day (assuming 6.5 hours for school, 2 hours a day eating/hygiene, 6.5-7.5 hours sleep) on weekdays and pretty much entire day (15 hours) on weekends/holidays.

If he's anything like me or other Aspergers-light nerds who grew up in the 80s, he probably spent 2 less hours sleeping and 2 more geeking out.

So that gives us 180*9 + 15*185 = 1620 + 2775 = 4395 hours a year, for a total of 21975 hours; and if we reduce sleep by 2 hours a day, 25625 total hours.

Wade estimates it a bit differently in 0006 (he comes out to a similar number which makes me think he was probably averaging out: 21840):

You’d be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, is a lot of study time.

This is plenty enough time to consume most of the main nerdish and other culture of the 1980s, with important pieces being consumed repeatedly.
- Most TV shows run less than 20-30 hours total. Entire Star Trek is only 531 hours as per this quora answer. And there weren't all that many large series like Simposons and Star Trek.
- If he's a typical geeky fast reader, books also don't take that long (average novel is ~100k words, meaning a fast 1k WPM reader can read the book in ~2 hours).
He himself noted that the main challenge was music. TV shows, books and games were manageable given the time frames involved, and a fact that Halliday left detailed lists of what to study.

He didn't watch them all.

I still hadn’t watched all of them yet, of course. That would probably take decades. (Level One, 0001)

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