The Rule
Morals are for fables.
OMFG
— Lauren, on reading the line:
"Hey, man. Reality is real."
— Ogden, when Wade finally wins the game.
"This has not been something..."
— Conor
"It's not been a theme..."
— Mike
Morals are for fables. Art speaks for itself. Summarizing wisdom is tricky, and downright painful when the wisdom is in direct contradiction to the rest of the piece, when it becomes a species of Hairy-Knuckled Chucks.
Counter-Example
Yeah. And you know? I think I learned something today, it doesn't matter if you're Christian or Jewish or Atheist or Hindu. Christmas still is about one very important thing: Presents
— Stan, "The Spirit of Christmas"
"If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with!"
— Dorothy Gale, "The Wizard of Oz" (1939)
Moralizing is such a cliché, even mocking it is clichéd, as "The Animaniacs" and the Wheel of Morality, and "South Park" and "I learned something today.", both from the 1990s, and by far not the earliest examples.
In fact, in one of the greatest movies of all time, 1939's The Wizard of Oz there looks to be a moral tearfully emoted by the impeccably pure-hearted Dorothy, but close examination reveals that it doesn't make a lick of sense, and one wonders whether it wasn't a wry put-on like the Wizards' gifts to the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion.
Commentary
There's a temptation (especially in television or things heavily influenced by television) to "sum up", to slap a moral on to a story, to put a big tag of "GOOD" or "BAD" to justify a time-waster or cheap thrill. Exploitation films used to skirt censorship laws this very way: Bookending a film with "don't do what you came here to watch"/"don't do what you just spent the last hour titillated by" allowed them to be classified as having "redeeming social value".
It's just as dishonest in a book as it is in, e.g., "Reefer Madness". It's egregious in RP1 because the entire point of the book is that "video games are the only thing that make life bearable". Not only is this never refuted overtly or subtextually, it's mulitiplied when Wade uses his super-sophisticated Hell Of A Rig...to play Pac-Man. Even inside a video game, the only thing worth doing is playing another video game.