For the Win, by Cory Doctorow

In spite of my disappointment with his recent collaboration with Charles Stross (see my review of The Rapture of the Nerds), Cory Doctorow remains a favorite author of mine.  His vision of the near future and the realistic projection of technological trends is brilliant and unequaled.  In his 2010 book For the Win, Doctorow explores the world of online gaming and the workers who toil away in the gold-farming sweat shops.  If you are like me (before I read For the Win), that last sentence makes no sense.  So for non-gamers like me, FTW is an education.

There are, in real life, these games that involve players from all over the world (massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs), playing against each other independently and in teams, using an online economy for buying and trading rewards, weapons, etc.  Thus there is a market for in-game objects, and an industry of professional gamers who play for the sole purpose of obtaining said objects to sell to other gamers.  Many of those gamers work for wages in computer sweat shops.

Gamers at a sweat shop in China.

With me so far?  Like I said, this is a world I have never experienced.  Doctorow tells the story of some of these gamers who lead a labor revolt, melding real-world and online-world tactics, to gain better working conditions and rights as workers.  The result is quite interesting and believable.  He draws on the history of labor movements from the industrial revolution forward, drawing direct connections to the era of internet labor.  The sidebars on economics, labor movements, multi-level marketing, and the like do interrupt the flow of the story, but are thought-provoking and draw FTW into the realm of the polemical novel.  (This will please some and turn away many, but I think it's interesting that Doctorow seems to have a larger agenda than to simply tell an interesting story.)

Besides the message of FTW, the story is well-told.  Spanning several continents and developing characters from several cultures, Doctorow puts it all together, not letting the reader get bogged down with the interlocking story lines.  All in all, FTW is a fun novel with a good story, but has a social message worth thinking about as well.