Author: Anne Ewbank
How far would you go to game? Some people go very far, indeed. Since the creation of virtual worlds, people have been spending real money to get a leg up on the competition. For a lot of gamers, it’s a choice between time and money. Getting all your online friends together to quest after a specific item is one option, but so is paying $20 over Paypal to someone in a country where that’s a lot of money. It’s simple economics, and Cory Doctorow’s book “For the Win” is all about the economics of gaming.
“For the Win” is the only novel out there that talks about the sweatshop industry of massively multi-player online-game gold farming, where workers, packed into spaces, play online games for a living by collecting in-game gold and items to sell for actual money, usually to first world players.
The practice of gold farming is relatively unknown to non-gamers, but buying farmed gold is considered cheating in the worst way in most online games. However, gold farmers are like any other sweatshop workers: underpaid, unrepresented and desperate for the jobs, despite poor wages and manipulative overseers.
The book follows several characters, at first only connected by their obsessive online gaming. Leonard is a sheltered Los Angeles gamer who feels disconnected from his everyday life and wants to move to China to be with his online friends. Mala is an Indian girl with the strategic capabilities of a highly-skilled general, directing armies of online players from her village Internet cafe and getting paid for it by a mysterious stranger. Matthew is a Chinese boy who starts his own gold farming factory to get out from under the thumb of his former gaming overseer.
Eventually they are all contacted by Big Sister Nor, a legendary online gamer who wants them to help her with the most dangerous task imaginable, both online and off: forming an international gold-farming union.
“For the Win” is young-adult fiction, set in the immediate future, with a timely social message. It’s about an ethnically diverse group of teenagers who stand up to senseless corporations and murderous villains. Sound familiar?
What makes “For the Win” unique, though, is the author’s incisive but loving description of Internet culture. He acknowledges its isolating power but shows, in the end, how the Internet is a force for unification.
The book’s greatest success is in its descriptions of place. The characters seem amplified by their surroundings, whether a sleek Silicon Valley office or Mumbai slums. Doctorow takes great pleasure in emphasizing the fact that, however different daily life is in different parts of the world, American gamers in air-conditioned rooms are playing to escape just as much as those playing alongside them in the Internet cafes of India and Indonesia.
Doctorow is famous on the Internet for writing fiction about Internet-related issues like privacy and copyright. He’s also famous for putting most of his writing online for free. You can buy “For the Win” in a bookstore, download it or read it in HTML format. The author is a passionate advocate for Creative Commons, a system where creative works can be shared and remixed endlessly without any copyright red tape. In essence, he won’t sue you if you create, distribute and profit from a work based on one of his. “[…] I want to treat my readers as partners and not crooks. There is no future in calling your most active promoters crooks,” Doctorow says.
To access the book online, visit www.craphound.com. For more information about the Creative Commons copyright system, check out www.creativecommons.org.
This article has been archived, for more requests please contact us via the support system.
