For the Win
By Cory Doctorow
Shortly, virtual economies play a key role in geopolitics. These economies share an everyday virtual world known as “game space”, essentially a more evolved form of the Internet with no borders or separate countries. However, in-game space, income inequality is staggeringly high and exacerbated by the exploitative practices of robber baron-type figures, including Boss Wing and Mr Banerjee. Matthew Fong lives in Shenzhen, China. He uses his talents at gold farming to find the optimal way to earn virtual gold in a dungeon in minimal time. With a couple of friends and roommates, they leave their greedy employer, Boss Wing, a virtual economy kingpin who steals their profits. Matthew finds a place in the fictional MMORPG Svartalfaheim Warriors, where it is possible to earn much more gold quickly.
He exploits this to make a month’s living in a single night before the game’s administrators discover and block him. However, Boss Wing sends his goons to raid Matthew’s home and beat him up to lure him back; they agree that Matthew can work on his own but has to surrender 60% of his income to Boss Wing, who handles turning game-gold into real money for him in turn. Leonard Goldberg is a wealthy American boy in Los Angeles. His father built up a big shipping company, but Leonard is primarily interested in playing games with his guildies in China. He teaches himself Mandarin and takes on the pseudonym “Wei-Dong” (meaning “strength of the East”). His team mentors other Angelenos in levelling up their avatars for money in another game, Savage Wonderland. After one customer makes a series of missteps, they nearly fail, but Wei-Dong can save them with luck. His stern, disapproving father discovers him playing at night due to time differences and decides to send his son off to a boarding school, Martindale Academy, for better discipline. On the way there, they get into a car accident. Amidst the confusion, Wei-Dong manages to run away to Santee Alley, where he rents a cheap room and starts to live on his own, making money as Mechanical Turk, a player who slips into NPCs when other players trigger something not implemented in the game’s AI. While he barely earns enough to make a living, Wei-Dong enjoys his newfound freedom playing for Coca-Cola Games, a massive subsidiary of The Coca-Cola Company that runs some of the most giant virtual worlds.
Mala moves with her mother and little brother from a small village in India to Mumbai, where her mother hopes to earn a better living. She ends up in a plastic recycling factory in Dharavi. With her friend Yasmin Gardez, Mala plays a game called Zombie Mecha in Mrs Dibyendu’s internet cafe for fun after school. Still, her mastery of tactics and leadership skills quickly attracted a considerable following, which calls her General Robotwallah. Soon, she is approached by Mr Banerjee, who recruits her to attack his business rivals in the game, allowing her family to leave the factory and make a better living. One day, her army gets defeated by a mysterious military; their charismatic leader identifies herself as “Big Sister Nor” to Mala. Nor tells her they are trying to recruit and organize game workers worldwide into the IWWWW (Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, a pun on IWW). The members of the IWWWW similarly call themselves “Webblies”, a pun on Wobblies and the web. Companies may move their production from one country to another whenever powerful unions arise because no borders or separate countries exist in game space, so there will always be a chance to reach the replacement workers and have them join the union. Mala initially dismisses the idea, however, and begins to believe the Webblies are sabotaging her career.
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Cory Doctorow
Cory Efram Doctorow was born in Toronto, Ontario, on 17 July 1971.
Biography
He is of Eastern European Jewish descent. His paternal grandfather was born in what is now Poland, and his paternal grandmother was from Leningrad. Both fled Nazi Germany’s advance eastward during World War II, and as a result, Doctorow’s father was born in a displaced persons camp near Baku, Azerbaijan. His grandparents and father emigrated to Canada from the Soviet Union. Doctorow’s mother’s family were Ukrainian-Russian Romanians.
Doctorow was a friend of Columbia law professor Tim Wu, and they had been dating since their time together in elementary school. Doctorow went to summer camp as a young teenager at what he has described as a “hippy summer camp” at Grindstone Island, near Portland, Ontario, that influenced his intellectual life and development. He quit high school, received his Ontario Academic Credit (high school diploma) from the SEED School in Toronto, and attended four universities without obtaining a degree. Cory Doctorow has stated that he is unrelated to the American novelist E. L. Doctorow and maybe a third cousin once he is removed from the novelist.
Thomas Rankin in Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works (2007) describes Doctorow as “a distant cousin of author E.L. Doctorow”. In June 1999, Doctorow co-founded the free software P2P company Opencola with John Henson and Grad Conn, which sold to the Open Text Corporation of Waterloo, Ontario, in the summer of 2003. The company used a drink called OpenCola as part of its promotional campaign. Doctorow later relocated to London and worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for four years, helping to establish the Open Rights Group, before leaving the EFF to pursue writing full-time in January 2006; Doctorow remained a Fellow of the EFF for some time after he departs from the EFF Staff. He was named the 2006–2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair for Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. He was sponsored jointly by the Royal Fulbright Commission, the Integrated Media Systems Center, and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy.
The professorship included a one-year writing and teaching residency at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, United States. He then returned to London but remained a frequent public speaker on copyright issues. 2009 Doctorow became the first Independent Studies Scholar in Virtual Residence at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. He was a student in the program during 1993–94 but left without completing a thesis. Doctorow was also a Visiting Professor at the Open University in the United Kingdom from September 2009 to August 2010. In 2012, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from The Open University. Doctorow married Alice Taylor in October 2008; they have a daughter named Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, born in 2008. Doctorow became a British citizen by naturalization on 12 August 2011. In 2015, Doctorow decided to leave London and move to Los Angeles, expressing disappointment at London’s “death” after Britain chose a Conservative government; he stated at the time, “London is a city whose two priorities are being a playground for corrupt global elites who turn neighbourhoods into soulless collections of empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky, and encouraging the feckless criminality of the finance industry. These two facts are not unrelated.” He rejoined the EFF in January 2015 to campaign for the eradication of digital rights management (DRM).
Doctorow left Boing Boing in January 2020 and soon started a solo blogging project titled Pluralistic. The circumstances surrounding Doctorow’s exit from the website were unclear at the time, although Doctorow acknowledged that he remained a co-owner of Boing Boing. Given the end of the 19-year association between Doctorow and Boing Boing, MetaFilter described this news as “the equivalent of the Beatles breaking up” for the blog world. Doctorow’s exit was not acknowledged by Boing Boing, with his name being quietly removed from the list of editors on 29 January 2020.
Cory Doctorow
