For the Win: A Novel

This is one of the best YA books I've read this year. You want to understand the world children live in, what they can do for hours and hours in a game, this is a book for you. Do you want to be enlightened to the fact that sweatshops exist in all shapes and sizes? This is the book for you. Are you

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interested in economics, stocks, ponzi schemes and other scams, unionization and it's future? This is definitely the book for you.

With a patient hand, Cory Doctorow gives clear, easy to understand examples of everything I talked about in my previous paragraph. Even if you are not a gamer, an explanation is always handy when gamer terms are brought into this story. If you are a teenager, then no worries - every single scheme is detailed out with easy to understand analogies.

The story flips back and forth between China, India, the US .. the entire globe. Everywhere children are being mistreated by the "bosses", those monopolizing the gold farming market - but these kids are good. They're really good, and now they are demanding the decent rights that every worker should have. This is not your typical video gaming set of kids - these are children who play 15+ hours a DAY farming the same area over and over - why? Because they love the games.

I could seriously rattle on and on about how much I loved this book, but I want everyone to read it. Gamer or no, this book should be on your list - give it to the teenagers you know, recommend it. I feel like, for the first time, I have some understanding with regards to how economics works .. all because of a book about gaming.

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For The Win is Cory Doctorow's second "Teen" novel, but stands up well with adult audiences as well. The story centers around gold farming in multiplayer online games, but features many themes rooted in current events. Most importantly, Doctorow does an outstanding job putting financial markets

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into perspective for any audience, and gives analogies for derivatives trading and market behavior that anyone can understand. This is where the novel excels, in addition to telling a great story packed with adventure, action, and geek-ery, there is an underlying thread that is not time, or age, or knowledge dependent.

This novel tells a story of teens, and even children, working in-game for bosses in the same way that children work sewing tennis shoes in sweat shops. There is a movement to organize workers using the borderless realm of the internet, and create a union. It shows us how important and powerful the internet is for communicating beyond nationalities and race, to reach everyone and make them realize they are really no different then their fellow humans toiling across the globe. He even incorporates the character of a young, bright-eyed economist working with the union, which gives the audience a chance to see a fresh perspective on markets and supply/demand interactions that they may not be exposed to yet.

I love all of Cory Doctorow's work, and this is yet another fine example. It is very fitting in the time period it has come out, but really will stand up as time goes on, and the economy changes yet again. Even though this was targeted to the teen audience, as was Little Brother, it will resonate with adults, especially with older geeks like myself!)

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Gamers, economics, intrigue, action and suspense! One of the best books I've ever read!

I read most of this book from the free epub available on Cory Doctorow's website. My first ever e-book!Unfortunately, I noticed a number of errors, and not just in the area of typos. That, and the repetition of some phrases and information made the reading experience less enjoyable than it could've

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been. I compared it some to my print version and it seems at least some of the errors were fixed. So I can only assume the epub was from a proof version of the book.But apart from all that, I did like it pretty well. I prefer the short story, "Enda's Game" to this, which is based on it. Kids are being used as gold farmers and other workers in various games. Adults and big business get rich off of their backs. They get paid poorly and have no rights. The story's set in America, China, India, and Singapore.I felt like I wanted more of the action to take place in the games rather than 'the real world'. And it would've been interesting if we didn't have _any_ white boys as main characters. It feels sort of like a crutch to me. If the story needed an American kid, he didn't need to be white. He didn't need to be male.But it's a very believable world. I could really see this happening. The near-future-ness of it makes me wonder how much is _already_ happening. And I learned a new word! 'av'. Yea, somehow I knew PvP and PK and some other game terms, but had never picked up 'av'. And then, of course, I immediately ran into it again in This Book is Overdue when she was talking about Second Life.Yea, I'm hip.I'd probably rank this as Cory's second-best book, behind Little Brother. But I haven't read Makers yet. (My Sony e-reader won't display the epub of that. Grr. May have to try the pdf.)Oh, and my Clarion classmate, Keyan Bowes, got a shout-out in the acknowledgements!

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Doctorow takes on the real-world economic implications of computer game currencies. Matthew is a Chinese gold farmer, one of the thousands who play role-playing games for hours in order to accumulate virtual money, points, and treasures that can be sold — for real money — to other players

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looking for quick power-ups in games such as World of Warcraft. Matthew’s is just one of several stories Doctorow follows as gamers, gold farmers, and those who would take advantage of them both meet in virtual worlds and eventually in the real world when player Big Sister Nor, in Singapore, decides to organize the Webblies, the “Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web.” An interesting take on the global economic implications that gaming could have in the "real world" however, I found the stories presented a little too over the top and at times I felt I was being lectured at. That being said, people who enjoyed his first novel Little Brother, will not be disappointed in his latest novel.

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I just couldn't read this any more. It sounds more like some political statement than a good story. I grabbed this because Little Brother was really good and moved quickly. This one just dragged on and on. I gave up on it a little less than 1/2 way though. I just didn't care about the characters or

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the story enough. I'm glad I got this as an ebook version for free and didn't have to pay for it.

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I liked FTW much more than Little Brother. It did spin on, and on, and on; but it handled the page count better than many of his other works. Watching the development of economic, political, and cultural ideas was exciting and interesting. There were a very large number of concepts that Doctorow

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tied nicely together into one solid package.

Although I didn't feel like it quite hit the 5 star mark for me, it was VERY close. I look forward to recommending it to my son as well!

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There's gold in them thar video games -- fake gold that can be exchanged in the real world for real money. Cory Doctorow's latest novel concerns the tension between labor and ownership, both within the worlds of international online gaming and in factories all over the world. Now that the world is

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wired, poor workers can communicate more easily than ever -- even/especially while pretending to be trolls and knights and wizards in vivid gamescapes. Doctorow keeps the action brisk, only pausing now and then to explain how "goldfarming" works (or to have his characters educate the reader through dialogue). I can tolerate the didactic passages because they are so interesting-- they hearken back to the days when people read novels to learn things. In many ways, "For The Win" is a larger, more ambitious version of Doctorow's "Little Brother." That book was well worth reading; so is this one.

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There are few places where a Chinese boy named Matthew, an affluent American Jew going by the name “Wei-Dong”, and an Indian slum girl named Mala can meet. These characters come together in the virtual world of corporate owned “massively multiplayer online role-playing games” (MMORPG) in

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Cory Doctorow’s new book, For The Win. Matthew toils as a game gold miner, collecting virtual wealth that can be sold for real money to rich gamers. Mala and her gang have been hired to take out miners like Matthew. Wei-Dong and a team of Chinese players usher amateur gamers to higher levels for 75 bucks a pop. All of this virtual work is performed under constant threats from the Chinese mafia Matthew abandoned to seek his own fortune, the goons that pay Mala and her gang, and corporate gamerunners who might cancel their accounts at any time. Then Big Sister Nor visits them “in-game” and proposes a plan that will change their lives both on and off-line: unionize the workers and completely restructure these virtual economies. Gamers and non-gamers alike will find the action of this book compelling as Big Sister Nor and her young “Webblies” scheme right under the noses of their oppressors. Readers of Doctorow’s previous work, Little Brother, will enjoy the same “sticking it to the man” attitude also found in For the Win. However, the drama in For the Win is frequently interrupted by Doctorow’s lectures on world politics, gaming and the labor movement. These missives become so tedious that I found myself groaning aloud when one character turns to another and says, “Do you want to learn a little history?”. I recommend this book for high school age readers due to its complex plot line, length (475 pages) and violence.

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Doctorow, acclaimed internet guru, focuses his attention in a completely different direction to his previous near future novel. This time the plot is driven by the flow of money that encapsulates the online gaming business and how gold-farming is an integral part of it. The story follows people on

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both sides of a power struggle that erupts as gold-farmers unite in an attempt to stand up to their bosses; the ones that lock them in rooms, deny their basic rights and pay them pittance. This is a morality tale and is rooted, as expected, in hard fact. For The Win tries too hard to make it's point and at times the story is lost amidst Doctorow's monologues. The character arcs also become difficult to follow at times, compounded by the narrative style used. For non-gamers some of the mystique may be lost, however For The Win is an interesting read for the current generation of gamers. It should also offer an insight in to the future of the gaming business for a wider audience too.

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In For The Win, Cory Doctorow takes on the world of online gaming. Specifically, he uses online gaming and gold farming to write a near future novel built around the idea of oppressed and abused gold farmers in China and India needing to unionize to get a fair shake from the bosses. It’s more

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interesting that it sounds, really. For today’s under-educated teens, they’ll get a pretty good education in economics as Cory frequently steps away from the plot to explain the economics behind gaming. In his previous novel, Doctorow took hacking and made it heroic. This time he does the same thing with online gaming. Close minded conservatives will hate the book because of the positive depiction of unions, and to be fair, even I think Doctorow could have put just a little of the big business point of view into the story. It’s not always 100% about simple exploitation of the workers. It’s a riveting story built around near future technology, economics, gaming, and union organization. Little Brother is still my favorite book by Doctorow, but For The Win is a close second.

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Chris brought a copy home from work for me, hurray.

I actually liked this a lot more than I thought I would. I expected it to make me cranky, but I really enjoyed reading it. When I thought hard about it, though, it was missing something... revelatory, I think, that's keeping me from rounding up the

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rating. In my heart.

One thing I knew right away, though -- it really is overlong. This story doesn't have to be 500 pages. To its credit, there isn't any thread or character I immediately think of cutting, but there's just a lot. This book is a ton of people. Maybe a trim in each region would have helped. (Yasmin & Ashok in India and Matthew in China are nice but not critical. Conversely, more about Big Sister Nor would have been good.) The funny, exclamation-pointy authorial economy lessons work pretty well, and they lend some seriousness to the plot points, but they do stick out a bit too.

But generally speaking, the deeply international setting is wonderful, and written like the author has been on the ground in those places (not sure?), the slang is cool, there's a lot of day-to-day culture that feels right, and the sociological take is almost never off-key. (There are perhaps a dozen too many "chin-waggles".)

The best parts just stick out really well. Jie and her "Jiandi" folk-hero internet pirate radio show fame in China is amazing. That whole long, long, long scene when she first scoops Lu up and keeps him safe in one of her secret apartments and puts him on the air is probably the coolest part of the book. I also really liked Wei-Dong ("Leonard") and his flight from American boarding school, and his voyage in a teched-out shipping container. He gets the only kid-and-parents family drama in the book and that's done nicely, though feels a bit out of place in this book about teenagers, the internet, and bad business.

In general, this felt like a great book for this author to write because it's awesome to have so much internet in a novel, written by someone who isn't only doing research, who feels it too. (This reminds me of the item on my wish list that is John Green write a book about internet friends.) Pretty much all of this stuff is real, or like what's real, and it's a deep level of detail but written really invitingly. Most of it isn't in my experience, but enough is tangential that it's exciting or funny or touching when it should be. All the hacker-ish stuff is totally thrilling to someone who's never done any of it, I won't lie. You lost me at "proxy", but ok I am totally flipping the page! The level of totally real espionage needed just to stay online, it's great, portrayed really well, and relevant to actual real places.

The only thing is, the thrust of the book, unionizing the gamers and this mission's clashes with authority... I'm not sure any of this was... necessary? I mean it's set up to make a lot of sense, and we can see in the story how these workers are exploited (and just, charming to read this YA book about labor organization you guys). But I think the workers of the world thing connects in only a limited way. Characters die (one of which was surprising, one of which was not). And this ambition kind of hurts its ending -- the scope is so big that waiting for all the laces to tie up is sort of ho-hum, eventually.

Moments I liked:

"'You violate the social contract, the other person doesn't know what to do about it. There's no script for it. There's a moment where time stands still, and in that moment, you can empty out his pockets.'"

And:

"Wei-Dong loved his parents. He wanted their approval. He trusted their judgment. That was why he'd been so freaked out when he discovered that they'd been plotting to send him away. If he hadn't cared about them, none of it would have mattered."

And, a joke worthy of repeating on the internet:

"He could feel everything that was happening in the games he ran. He could tell when there was a run on gold in Svartalfheim Warriors, or when Zombie Mecha's credits took a dive. ... He could tell when there was a traffic jam on the Brooklyn Bridge in Zombie Mecha as too many ronin tried to enter Manhattan to clear out the Flatiron Building and complete the Publishing Quest."

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I'm not so sure this is really a YA book. It's sprawling fiction which reads more like a techno-philosophical novel for adults. There are multiple plot lines, and the stories of the various characters are peppered with bits of "Cory Doctorow explains it all for you." Doctorow has a unique

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perspective on how cutting edge technology intersects with history, sociology, and economic theory. I don't think there's another person who would be able to mix theory with fiction in such a way.
Unfortunately to me For the Win is a little too big, there are too many characters, too much theory, and the whole thing ends up too muddled. I loved Little Brother, and I think that book was much more focused, and ultimately more compelling.

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Finished this book (audio) a few days ago and would like to point out it was a very very slow starter that I nearly shut down several times. However, things picked up and I was able to finish it. My overall rating is really based on the story as narration was excellant. Also, there probably are not

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many books I will like for a while after reading Ready Player One and now trying to compare all others to it, they cannot stand up. With that said, For the Win is ok, not great, but if you can get thru the first few chapters you will enjoy the conclusion.

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Cory Doctorow’s gamer novel For the Win takes what’s now an old-fashioned topic –workers’ rights – and tosses it into a 21st century context – massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). These games have, in effect, their own economies which stretch outside the game

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through real-world online stores that sell in-game currencies. Young people in sweat-shop conditions play the games hour after hour, selling the goods that their characters gain for gold (or whatever passes for currency in that particular game world); this process is called gold farming. The people running the sweat-shops sell the in-game gold to gamers desperate (or lazy) enough to cheat. The remote ‘workers’ earn their ‘employers’ income, often with little to no benefits – or human dignity.

After introducing the basic situation, Doctorow really lets loose. In the Internet cafes and MMORPG ‘factories’, workers start demanding fair treatment and pay. Game companies hire analysts to track and ban these gold farmers from their game worlds. The gold-seller markets combine into black market economies. Stock brokers and economists package futures on in-game commodities into complex bonds that are bought and sold like their real-world equivalents. Union leaders on two continents use modern communication technologies to organize a unified front and stay ahead of the police. The workers’ ultimate weapon is a financial scheme copied from real-world stock markets. We follow the stories of Mala from India, Matthew from China, and Leonard from California. They and others are drawn into a fierce international struggle for humane treatment and for workers’ rights, online or off.

Doctorow’s idea is fascinating. The potential overlaps of our real world and online worlds are carefully described. Unfortunately, most characters remain thin, and some of the in-game details he invents seem odd (and I say this as a life-long gamer). And speaking of details, you can clean yourself with a basin of water and a washcloth instead of wasting gallons of water with a shower. You’d think that people living in cramped quarters in China, especially when the water supply might be unpredictable, would have come up with such an astounding concept even if a pampered Californian teenager can’t. Little things like these made it difficult for me to suspend my disbelief.
EJ 10/2010

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This is a book that is so timely, yet instantly dated, that while I was reading it I wondered what people would think about it 10, 20, 50 years in the future, if anyone remembers it. It was sort of like a late-2000s version of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, every bit as heavy-handed, almost as

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painful, but ultimately so READABLE!

It was basically a story about people who farm gold for online MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Runescape (or their fictional equivalents). These people are crapped-upon third-world wage slaves, just like the factory workers that make your clothes, shoes, toys and electronics. They work long hours for little pay, aren't allowed to look up from their work or go to the bathroom, are kept for overtime work without pay, and often receive violent treatment from their bosses or foremen. They have another problem, too: established unions won't take them seriously because they "just play games" for a living. The fact that they are so scattered throughout the world doesn't make it any easier for them to organize, either.

The cast of characters for this story are introduced one at a time, but their paths all intersect in time, and each more interesting than the last:

A headstrong Los Angeles brat who runs away from home when his parents try to keep him from playing online games 20 hours a day.

A group of teenage boys in China who are brutally beaten by thugs sent by their former employer when they leave their gold farming jobs to start their own company.

A group of preteen girls and boys in a slum in India who are paid by a sinister stranger to hunt down and kill gold farmers in a game called Zombie Mecha.

A shrewd American man who is an expert in game economies who lands a job overseeing the economies of all the online games owned by the Coca Cola Company.

A sexy young woman with the survival instincts of a street rat who hosts a pirate call-in radio show where she encourages factory girls to stand up for their rights.

And finally, a trio of young adults in Singapore who are trying to organize online workers across the world to fight the corrupt bosses that treat them all like garbage.

With a cast of characters like that, how could you not want to read it? I’ve seen some reviews that complain that this book was too long. I don’t entirely agree, but I think that this book might be better off classified as an adult book. I know it’s tough to have books starring young people be interesting to adults, but times are changing. It was awfully long, but when I finished it, I could see Doctorow continuing the story indefinitely. It didn’t come to any real conclusion. How could it? Nothing ever ends, especially when it comes to labor rights which are constantly being negotiated.

Thos book doesn’t have chapters, it just keeps chugging along, but Doctorow stops the action several times to tell anecdotes that help explain economic concepts. He does it so well, it doesn’t come across as dry or didactic. He even pulls of up-to-date internet slang without sounding like a total lameass. It’s hard for me to imagine many teens who would read all the way through this and think it was as rad as I did, but I would recommend it for ages 17 to adult, who want something they can really sink their teeth into.

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Doctorow is one of the most current near future science fiction writers. This is a great tale about gold farmers (people - usually in poor countries - who play games to build up game gold and then sell it to rich westerners) and their struggle to unionise themselves. I enjoyed the book, as I

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usually do with Doctorow, however it also left me a little unsatisfied and seems a bit naive in places.

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globalization, world wide web, young adult fiction, social media, gaming

Not in the same league as Little Brother, but a decent read. Some bizarrely repetitive turns of phrase, and some interesting economics lessons.

If somebody alked up to me and said, "I have a book I know you're going to love. It's all about economics, labour unions, and the unfair working conditions in developping countries," I might suspect this person doesn't know my reading tastes very well. Such a book might appeal to those with

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specific interests, but me, well, that's not my thing.

And then this person would hand me For the Win, and I'd be intrigued because it involves gaming, something I'm familiar with. And then I'd read it, and be blown away.

That's Doctorow's genius in this book. He can take all of the above concepts and make them not only interesting, but make them into something that anyone can relate to, especially today's game-happy youth culture. He can take economics and break them down into the simply complex and absurd things that they are, and make it comprehensible. He makes the legnths that some companies go to to control virtual wealth seem like what it is: ridiculous and yet incredibly valuable. This book makes you look at the world, see it in a different light, and get outraged that it isn't better. It's hard-hitting, heartbreaking, and like the games it talks about, endlessly entertaining.

The characters are, above all else, wonderfully human. There are sides of right and wrong, and the lines are clearly drawn, but the people on the side of good are still flawed, violent and angry and they make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes end up fatal. These are people you could pass on the street, could see at school; they don't have to be half a world away in some poorly-ventilated sweatshop, and that just seeks to underscore the message of labour equality that's the main focus of the novel. "There are no Chinese workers. There are just workers."

If you think this books comes across as being a bit preachy, you'd be right. But when your characters are fighting for the right to refuse 22-hour shifts without being beaten, fighting for the right to not be raped in order to hang onto their jobs, I think a little preachiness is allowed.

This book came to me highly recommended, and it leaves my hands in the same state. Go, pick up this book, read it and learn things that you may not have even thought about before. And I dare you to tell me that at the end of it, you didn't feel your moral centre being tugged at, even just a little.

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I loved the first half of this book, but for me, the second half bogged down.Imagine a world a few years forward from ours. On-line gaming is a really, really big deal. The amount of money moving around within the games is huge. It's all play money, of course. Except there are significant numbers

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of people willing to trade real money for it."Gold farms" are a booming business-- groups spend long hours playing to earn game cash and other rewards, which then get sold to players looking for a boost. At first glance, it seems like a dream come true-- get paid to play video games. However, sweatshop conditions for these farmers take the pleasure away, and the demanding bosses with out of game enforcers take away the possibility of starting your own business.The book follows several people:Matthew is a young man in China, who is attempting to set up his own crew farming gold. His old bosses are not pleased.Wei-Dong is an American high school student. He's renamed himself to fit in better with his Chinese buddies he plays with all night. He finds himself living on his own when he runs away from his family, who are about to ship him to a school that will help him stay on track, away from any distractions.Mala lives in India, and commands her own army of players. When they first are offered money to play, it seems too good to be true. They find themselves deeper and deeper in a situation far less pleasant than expected.More characters are introduced throughout the book, and I was overwhelmed by them all near the end. There were so many, each with a role to play.At the beginning of the book, I loved the look at the interplay between the real and gaming worlds. The look at the meaning of money was fascinating and thought provoking. Bringing in politics and unions also kept causing me to stop and think about it. When the game-makers views of the issues were added, I loved seeing that side. Eventually, it got to be a little too much.Overall, that's my opinion of the book-- too much of too many good things.

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There was a good story in there somewhere. It just got bogged down by the rambling, repetitive explanations of economics and the inner workings of speculative markets. I thought most of the characters were developed well with the exception of Big Sister Nor, which is kind of funny since she's the

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character that holds all the story lines together.

I'm not sure how this is considered a book for 12-17 year olds. If I'd read/listened to this book at that age, I would have quit pretty qui...moreThere was a good story in there somewhere. It just got bogged down by the rambling, repetitive explanations of economics and the inner workings of speculative markets. I thought most of the characters were developed well with the exception of Big Sister Nor, which is kind of funny since she's the character that holds all the story lines together.

I'm not sure how this is considered a book for 12-17 year olds. If I'd read/listened to this book at that age, I would have quit pretty quickly. I get that the majority of characters are young teens, but the intricacies of the plot and the before mentioned economic and investment lessons would have lost my attention.

Which isn't to say that I won't try more Doctorow. I've heard good things about his other books, but this one just didn't gel well. Too many side notes that seemed to go on forever, tearing me out of the story as a whole. It's hard to get into a story that has five or six plot lines with entirely different sets of characters as it is. Throw in long, rambling, repetitive tangents and things are going to fall apart in places.

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All around the world, people are playing games, battling for online gold, jewels, points, levels and status. And in poor nations, there are players who play for these treasures, but then their employers trade the virtual gold for real money -- from those who want to pay to skip to higher-level play

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immediately. This is the story of brilliant Mala in India, Matthew in Shenzen, Leonard (aka Wei-Dong) from California, and Big Sister Nor in rural China, who are all trying to break out of the sweatshops where low pay, fear and the threat of violence hangs over them if they do not earn enough every day. Big Sister Nor wants every "gold farmer" to join a union, to protect the rights of those who work from abusive employers and allow them to earn a decent wage and work decent hours, but those who make the money off this scheme will use any means necessary to keep things as they are -- including murder. The plan is to crash the virtual economies of every game in the world, all at once... if they can pull it off. Great for gamers and anyone who needs a challenging read with a big-picture view, 8th grade and up.

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I liked this, but it didn't have quite the emotional depth and resonance of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. And he felt he had to cram in a little too much economics into the exposition, which felt a bit forced. Still, I enjoyed this effort, and its depictions of labor unrest in the

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developing world felt as real as anything I've read on the subject. That said, the labor organizers and activists came off as a little too good to be true. Not to say the labor organizers and activists aren't on the side of the angels, but they seemed a bit idealized here. Anyhow, generally a good read, and I recommend it, but the depth of characters didn't quite bring it to the 4 star level.

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