FTW

Cory Doctorow's For the Win may be a bit teen-targeted and melodramatic, but he does certainly raise a few important points with regards to gaming. The book is split up into numerous plot threads, some related and some not, each of which highlights different gaming-related issues through the eyes of a particular character.

The story of Wei-Dong, Matthew, Lu, and their party of Chinese (and not-Chinese) gold farmers has easily contained the majority of these developments so far. Wei-Dong was an American working with the Chinese farmers who had become addicted to his game, and it had an enormous impact on his studies - he dropped from straight As to low Cs in an alarmingly short timeframe. The resulting problems eventually compounded to such an extent that he ran away from home to start living alone, gold mining on his own until he was old enough to escape his parents' authority. Matthew, Lu, and the Chinese side of the guild were working at the same task under harsh conditions for what could almost be considered a mobster boss until they were raided by the police, beaten, and dragged off to prison. Lu managed to get away and meet a girl, Jie, who runs a radio show revolving around injustices towards workers like him. A few casually mentioned points of interest are the playful use of the derogatory term "gweilo" (a rather rude way to refer to a foreigner) towards Wei-Dong by Chinese members of the guild, which reflects on the overuse and possible desensitization of gamers towards similar derogatory slang in today's competitive gaming environment, and Jie's passing mention of the Skinner Box, a study of addiction revealing that a rat will eventually learn to press a lever a given number of times to receive food, but will continually hammer on the lever if food is dispensed at random intervals. This is a very important principle to apply to gaming, whether it is to study video game addiction or simply how to draw players into a game and coerce them to play more. Similarly discussed is a character who is studying a "formula for fun," trying to find the optimal way to get players to come back to a game whether they enjoy it or not.

Much of what I got out of Mala's story was the sense of uncertainty between members of her team and the concept of paid griefers, whose job it is to hunt down and thwart competitors' gold miners. Situations like this raise the question of when playing a game is no longer playing a game, and when it becomes business, as well as identifying the fickle nature and detachedness of supposed in-game "allies." Online gaming is often ignorant of class, race, gender, and other factors, and this story serves to highlight the upsides and downsides of this fact. When playing a game for real-world gain, there is much to gain and little to lose by betraying "allies" for a higher bidder, and one has to wonder how well-defined "friends" and "allies" in such an environment truly are, with few consequences for immoral behavior and devastating results from being turned on.

As I've started to flesh out, among the basic story told in the book, there are hidden questions being raised - in some cases questions that people haven't had to ask before because there existed no context for them. What are some of the issues that you found stood out at you when you were reading the book? Were any of them unique to a gaming environment, or do they have a broader spectrum as well?