For the Win - First Half

So far, For the Win by Cory Doctorow is a fictional book about different people around the world who get paid to play and eventually all get connected by the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web (IWWWW), a union of people who get paid to play.

There are many different characters in the book. Matthew is a master golf farmer who used to work for a guy named Boss Wing, but then he and the other workers went on strike. Leonard/Wei-Dong is a paid gamer in America who ran away from home because his parents were going to send him away for playing too many games. Lu is a friend of Leonard and Matthew, participated in the strike, and got interviewed by Jiandi, the host of the Factory Girl Show. Mala is a girl from Dharavi who started playing games for fun, but then got noticed as a extremely good gamer by a man named Mr. Banerjee, and now gets paid to attack other workers within the game.Yasmin is a 14 year old girl who was Mala's friend and was part of her "army," but then realized the people she was attacking within the game were just workers just like her, so she decided to join the IWWWW. Big Sister Nor is the leader of IWWWW, but was badly beaten and in the hospital (at halfway through the book). All the characters mentioned except for Mala are part of IWWWW.

So far the book is entertaining and informative. Doctorow really puts the reader into the shoes of these characters. Before I read the book, I thought of gold-farmers as people who just were too lazy to get a real job so they decided to sell gold to make money without caring about messing with game economies. Now I can see that there are large factories of people who farm gold for a living and get paid very little. In addition to helping readers understand why people do this, Doctorow gives lessons like the basic economy lecture between Ashok and Yasmin on pages 83-86.

One thing I don't like about this book is how Doctorow writes out the in-game parts. The games are fictional, so it's hard to picture what's happening and what's actually going on. I know he's trying to compel the reader by using all the details of the games, but with the number of different games he writes about, it all just gets confusing and I usually just skip over those parts.

Overall the book is quite interesting and I haven't really dreaded reading it. My question is, who is your favorite character so far?