Review: ‘For the Win’ by Cory Doctorow

Yesterday, I reviewed Cory Doctorow’s novella “Anda’s Game”, about gold-farming and labor unions in MMOs. Today I’m going to look at Doctorow’s latest young-adult novel, For the Win, that continues this theme. As with almost all of his works, For the Win can be downloaded for free from Doctorow’s website (or see the end of the article for direct links to the eReader version I compiled).

Doctorow’s last couple of novels have been largely hit or miss for me—Little Brother was a bit too didactic, and the characters in Makers were a singularly unsympathetic bunch. But since Doctorow gives them away as free e-books, I can read them without risking feeling like I wasted money if I don’t like them.

And happily, For the Win is a return to the Doctorow form I like best. In fact, you could say that if you’re looking for a compelling, interesting story about labor unions, liberty, gold farming, and financial derivatives, then it’s For the Win…for the win.

The Setting

Where “Anda’s Game” was necessarily a bit simplistic because of the shorter form of the story, “complicated” is the watchword for For the Win. Rather than a single protagonist, the book features an ensemble cast who get roughly equal screen time. The viewpoint is first-person limited, but the viewpoint character shifts with each section.

Where “Anda’s Game” centered around Mexico, For the Win centers around where most gold-farming operations have migrated in the real world: the poorer parts of Asia, such as India and China. It is clearly set at some point in the near future—perhaps ten or twenty years from now—though no specific year is ever given.

It is a time when corporations such as Coca-Cola run MMOs as promotional items like websites, and game companies employ real people as “Mechanical Turks” to give NPCs an extra cachet of unpredictability. World of Warcraft seems to have gone by the wayside—it is mentioned only once, and referred to as “the dawn of time.”

The Characters

Mala, a girl from Dharavi, India has a talent for gaming that leads her to form her own army out of the patrons of a local cyber-cafe—and is subsequently approached to raid rival gold-farmers for money just as Clan Fahrenheit was in “Anda’s Game”. Coming from a hardscrabble background, Mala has few qualms about the work—though her chief lieutenant, Yasmin, soon develops them when she talks to a labor union organizer, Big Sister Nor.

Matthew, a Chinese former sweatshop gold-farmer who has gone independent, is now part of a clan that does gold-farming and leveling for money. Its members include a fellow Chinese gamer named Lu, and an American Sinophile Leonard “Wei-Dong” Goldberg whose devotion to the gaming lifestyle is leading to poor grades and hence trouble between himself and his parents.

And Connor Prikkel is a former economy student who developed a set of equations that revolutionized the market in virtual property, allowing him to predict the proper market value of any virtual items and corner the market, making a fortune in game money—which could then be converted into real money.

As a result, gold-selling has expanded from a simple cash-for-gold operation into an entire full-fledged market, complete with futures and other derivatives. Prikkel is now the chief economist for Coca-Cola’s games division, and thus on a collision course with the other characters…

The Ideas

The story is complex, but rewarding for readers who stick with it. Doctorow has put on his far-seeing glasses again and come up with some really clever predictions and ideas—not just about the MMO virtual property market, but other future technological and sociological developments.

One of my favorites is when Doctorow combines the idea of person-smuggling in cargo containers with the practice of making cargo containers into prefab homes—thus having a character create himself his own secret smuggling “home away from home” to sneak himself into China aboard a cargo freighter. That’s just so clever, it’s surprising that human-smuggling operations aren’t using it in the real world.

Doctorow also seemed to have a lot of fun making up the various MMORPGs mentioned in the story. There’s Svartalfaheim Warriors, the World of Warcraft analogue, based on Norse mythology. There’s Zombie Mecha, a giant-robots-meets-zombies game. And there’s the Mushroom Kingdom, a MMORPG setting based on Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers franchise. (Doctorow doesn’t seem to have any problem using real-world trademarks in his stories, though he does so only where a cultural reference makes it worth doing.)

The Geek

And I have to love a novel that spends several paragraphs setting up how much money Coca Cola had spent on designing a control center for its gaming HQ that looked like a slick, high-tech movie set—then adds:

Ten seconds after the game-runners moved into Command Central, every multitouch had been broken or stolen. The recessed terminals set into the tables were obsolete before they were installed and now they suffered an ignominious fate: serving as stands for cutting-edge laptops equipped with graphics cards that ran so hot, their fans sounded like jet-engines.

Fifteen seconds later, every flat surface had been covered with junk-food wrappers, pizza boxes, energy-drink cans, vintage sci-fi novels, used kleenexes, origami orc-helmets folded out of post-it notes, snappy hats, and the infinitely varied junky licensed crap that CCG made from the game, from Pez dispensers to bicycle valve-caps to trading cards to flick-knives.

Twenty seconds after that, the room acquired the game-runner funk, a heady mix of pizza-grease strained through armpit pores, cheap cologne, unwashed hair, vintage Japanese denim, and motor oil.

And now the sleek supergenius lair had become the exclusive meeting-cave for a tribe of savage, hyper-competitive, extremely well-paid game-runners, who holed up in there, gnashing their teeth and shouting at each other for every hour that God sent. No cleaner would enter the room, and even the personal assistants would only go so far as the doorway, where they plaintively called out their bosses’ names and dodged the disgusting food-wrappers that were hurled at their heads by the game-runners, who did not take kindly to having their work interrupted.

Oh yes, the glasses don’t lie: Cory Doctorow is a dyed-in-the-wool old-school geek.

The Execution

Doctorow does a great job setting up all the important characters as real, three-dimensional people—people the reader can care about even when they are at odds with each other. Some of these characters don’t survive all the way through the story, and each death is definitely shocking.

There are some scenes that echo “Anda’s Game”, though again Doctorow chooses the less easy path this time. Anda’s in-game fight with her guildmate, Lucy, over the rightness of what they are doing shows up here in a similar fight between Yasmin and Mala—only in this case, the conflict does not take place in the game, and its repercussions are not so easily glossed over.

The story contains the usual young-adult trope of teens trying to make sense of the world, but mixes in people trying to change the world for the better as well. The totalitarian state of China makes a much better backdrop for this sort of story than Mexico would have.

And he even manages to sneak in some education in the basics of global economics, delivering such factoids as that all the gold ever mined in the course of human civilization would amount to a cube with sides the length of a mere tennis court—and that there are more gold certificates in circulation than there is actual gold to back them. He explains what derivatives are and how they work—maybe not in enough detail to explain the great banking crash, but enough that readers can follow along, and perhaps get a sense of how fascinating economics really is.

The novel has a satisfying ending, but it is not really a conclusion. Whereas “Anda’s Game” ended on an optimistic note, implying now that Clan Fahrenheit is on the side of the angels, everything’s going to be all right, the battle in For the Win might be won but the war has just begun and might last a long time. (And don’t expect a sequel—Doctorow doesn’t generally do those.)

But that’s all right. It just serves to make the book feel more real. Not every story ends neatly at the close of the page.

One slightly odd note: even though the book is entitled For the Win, after the popular gamer slang, the expression “for the win” (or “ftw”) is never actually used in the book itself. Funny, that.

Conclusion

As I said in the review of “Anda’s Game”, I don’t know if anyone is attempting to use MMOs to organize gold farmers into labor unions, but it’s an intriguing-enough ideas that you would think someone would want to try it. The way events unfold in For the Win makes sense, and makes for a compelling story. I highly recommend checking it out. It’s free, what can you lose?

Incidentally, for people who enjoy the free e-book enough that they would like to donate back to the author, Cory Doctorow asks that you instead participate in an adopt-a-school program he has put together. Schools that would like a copy of the book send in their information, then it is posted to the FTW donation page so that donors can send a copy of the book to that library. This way the publisher also gets its share of the money.

As a reminder, I created an eReader-format conversion of this book, which you can download from Doctorow’s site, or else you can download the PDB file here or a zip file containing PDB + PML source here.

If you want to download it directly into eReader from your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, click this link from Mobile Safari (or use this link if you use the Barnes & Noble eReader, or this one for the Barnes & Noble iPad eReader which has not come out yet at the time of this posting). Enjoy!