For the Win

For The Win is the second young adult science fiction novel by Canadian author Cory Doctorow. It was released in May 2010. The novel is available free on the author's website as a Creative Commons download, and is also published in traditional paper form by Tor Books.

The book is centered around massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Even though the novel is targeted toward young adults, it takes on significant concepts such as macroeconomics and labor rights. It covers the new and fast evolving concept of virtual economy. It also deals with MMORPG specific topics like gold farming and power-leveling.^[1]

Plot

Part 1: The gamers and their games, the workers at their work

Matthew Fong lives in Shenzhen, China. He's very talented at gold-farming and is able to find the optimal way to earn virtual gold in a dungeon in minimal time. Together with a couple of friends he lives on that, after they left Boss Wing, a man employing boys to gold-farm for him but keeping most of the profits. Matthew finds a place in the game of Svartalfaheim Warriors where it is possible to earn a lot in short time, and exploiting this discovery with his team is able to make a month's living in a single night before the administrators of the game discover and block them. However, Boss Wing has Matthew's home raided and him beaten because he wants his most talented gold-farmer back; they agree that Matthew can work on his own but has to surrender 60% of his income to Boss Wing, who handles turning game-gold into real money for him in turn.

Leonard Goldberg is a well-situated American boy in Los Angeles. His father built up a big shipping company, but Leonard is mostly interested in playing games with his guildies in China. He taught himself Mandarin and favours being called "Wei-Dong" (meaning "Strength of the East"). In his team, they have an appointment helping an American boy level up his avatar in the game of Savage Wonderland for money. Following a mistake of their customer, they nearly fail but Wei-Dong is able to save them with a lot of luck. His father discovers him playing during night-time (because of time differences to China) and since he regards games as a waste of time, decides to send his son off to a boarding school (Martindale Academy) for better discipline. On the way off, they have a car accident and in the confusion caused by it, Wei-Dong manages to run off. He makes it to Santee Alley, where he rents a cheap room and starts to live on his own, making money as Mechanical Turk (a player who slips into NPCs when other players trigger something not implemented in the game's AI) for Coca-Cola Games, who runs some of the biggest virtual worlds. The payment is not much, but he is able to live on it and enjoys playing as well as his new freedom.

Mala moved together with her mother and little brother from a small village in India to Mumbai, where her mother hoped to earn a better living. She ended up in a plastic recycling factory in Dharavi. Mala plays a game called Zombie Mecha in Mrs Dibyendu's internet cafe after school for fun together with her friend Yasmin Gardez, but since she's very good at tactics and leading battles, soon she gathers a group of admirerers around her who call her "General Robotwallah", being her army. Soon, she is approached by a man called Mr Banerjee and employed by him to attack other players, who are business rivals. This employment earns her whole family a better living, so they can soon rent a new, bigger flat and her mother is no longer forced to work in the plastic factory. One day, her army gets defeated by a mysterious opposing army; its leader identifies herself to Mala as "Big Sister Nor". She tells her that they are trying to recruit and organize game-workers all over the world into the IWWWW (Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, a pun on IWW). The members of the IWWWW call themselves "Webblies", which is again a pun on Wobblies and the web. In game-space, no borders or seperate countries exist; and while companies may move their production from one country to another whenever powerful unions arrise, online, there will always be a chance to reach the replacement workers and have them join the union, too. Mala does not like the idea at first, however, thinking others are just being envious of her career.

References

External links

• Official Book Page on Cory Doctorow's website
• Online Version of the book
• Manifesto for a virtual revolution: 2010 interview with Tom Chatfield, discussing For the Win and cyber-activism