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For the Win: A Novel Hardcover – May 11, 2010
In the virtual future, you must organize to survive
At any hour of the day or night, millions of people around the globe are engrossed in multiplayer online games, questing and battling to win virtual "gold," jewels, and precious artifacts. Meanwhile, others seek to exploit this vast shadow economy, running electronic sweatshops in the world's poorest countries, where countless "gold farmers," bound to their work by abusive contracts and physical threats, harvest virtual treasure for their employers to sell to First World gamers who are willing to spend real money to skip straight to higher-level gameplay.
Mala is a brilliant 15-year-old from rural India whose leadership skills in virtual combat have earned her the title of "General Robotwalla." In Shenzen, heart of China's industrial boom, Matthew is defying his former bosses to build his own successful gold-farming team. Leonard, who calls himself Wei-Dong, lives in Southern California, but spends his nights fighting virtual battles alongside his buddies in Asia, a world away. All of these young people, and more, will become entangled with the mysterious young woman called Big Sister Nor, who will use her experience, her knowledge of history, and her connections with real-world organizers to build them into a movement that can challenge the status quo.
The ruthless forces arrayed against them are willing to use any means to protect their power―including blackmail, extortion, infiltration, violence, and even murder. To survive, Big Sister's people must out-think the system. This will lead them to devise a plan to crash the economy of every virtual world at once―a Ponzi scheme combined with a brilliant hack that ends up being the biggest, funnest game of all.
Imbued with the same lively, subversive spirit and thrilling storytelling that made LITTLE BROTHER an international sensation, FOR THE WIN is a prophetic and inspiring call-to-arms for a new generation
- Print length480 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTor Teen
- Publication dateMay 11, 2010
- Grade level9 - 12
- Reading age13 - 18 years
- Dimensions5.79 x 1.57 x 8.48 inches
- ISBN-100765322161
- ISBN-13978-0765322166
- Lexile measure1070L
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Review
“A terrific read ... A cogently written, passionately felt argument.” ―The New York Times on Little Brother
“Awesome…He's terrific at finding the human aura shimmering around technology.” ―The Los Angeles Times on Little Brother
“A believable and frightening tale of a near-future San Francisco … Filled with sharp dialogue and detailed descriptions… within a tautly crafted fictional framework.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Little Brother
“One of the year's most important books.” ―Chicago Tribune on Little Brother
“A wonderful, important book…I'd recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I've read this year.” ―Neil Gaiman, author of The Graveyard Book on Little Brother
“A rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion―as necessary and dangerous as file sharing, free speech, and bottled water on a plane.” ―Scott Westerfeld, author of Uglies, Pretties, and Specials on Little Brother
About the Author
Canadian-born Cory Doctorow is the author of the New York Times bestselling young adult novel Little Brother, and the co-editor of the popular blog BoingBoing. His adult science fiction novels and short stories have won him three Locus Awards and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He has been named one of the Web's twenty-five "influencers" by Forbes Magazine and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
For the Win
By Cory Doctorow, Patrick Hayden, Teresa Nielsen HaydenTom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 2010 Cory DoctorowAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2216-6
Contents
Part I: The gamers and their games, the workers at their work,Part II: Hard work at play,
Part III: Ponzi,
Acknowledgments,
CHAPTER 1
Part I
The gamers and their games, the workers at their work
In the game, Matthew's characters killed monsters, as they did every single night. But tonight, as Matthew thoughtfully chopsticked a dumpling out of the styrofoam clamshell, dipped it in the red hot sauce and popped it into his mouth, his little squadron did something extraordinary: they began to win.
There were eight monitors on his desk, arranged in two ranks of four, the top row supported on a shelf he'd bought from an old lady scrap dealer in front of the Dongmen Market. She'd also sold him the monitors, shaking her head at his idiocy: at a time when everyone wanted giant 30" screens, why did he want this collection of dinky little 9" displays?
So they'd all fit on his desk.
Not many people could play eight simultaneous games of Svartalfheim Warriors. For one thing, Coca-Cola (who owned the game) had devoted a lot of programmer time to preventing you from playing more than one game on a single PC, so you had to somehow get eight PCs onto one desk, with eight keyboards and eight mice on the desk, too, and room enough for your dumplings and an ashtray and a stack of Indian comic books and that stupid war-axe that Ping gave him and his notebooks and his sketchbook and his laptop and —
It was a crowded desk.
And it was noisy. He'd set up eight pairs of cheap speakers, each glued to the appropriate monitor, turned down low to the normal hum of Svartalfheim — the clash of axes, the roar of ice-giants, the eldritch music of black elves (which sounded a lot like the demo programs on the electric keyboards his mother had spent half her life manufacturing). Now they were all making casino noise, pay-off noises, as his raiding party began to clean up. The gold rolled into their accounts. He was playing trolls — it was trolls versus elves in Svartalfheim, though there was an expansion module with light elves and some kind of walking tree — and he'd come through an instance dungeon that was the underground lair of a minor dark-elvish princeling. The lair was only medium hard, with a lot of trash mobs early on, then a bunch of dark-elf cannon fodder to be mown down, some traps, and then the level-boss, a wizard who had to be taken out by the spellcasters in Matthew's party while the healers healed them and the tanks killed anything that tried to attack them.
So far, so good. Matthew had run and mapped the dungeon on his second night in-world, a quick reccy that showed that he could expect to do about 400 gold's worth of business there in about twenty minutes, which made it a pretty poor way to earn a living. But Matthew kept very good notes, and among his notes was the fact that the very last set of guards had dropped some mareridtbane, which was part of the powerful Living Nightmare spell in the new expansion module. There were players all over Germany, Switzerland and Denmark who were buying mareridtbane for 800 gold per plant. His initial reccy had netted him five plants. That brought the total expected take from the dungeon up to 4,400 gold for twenty minutes, or 13,200 gold per hour — which, at the day's exchange, was worth about $30, or 285 renminbi.
Which was — he thought for a second — more than 71 bowls of dumplings.
Jackpot.
His hands flew over the mice, taking direct control of the squad. He'd work out the optimal path through the dungeon now, then head out to the Huoda internet cafe and see who he could find to do runs with him at this. With any luck, they could take — his eyes rolled up as he thought again — a million gold out of the dungeon if they could get the whole cafe working on it. They'd dump the gold as they went, and by the time Coca-Cola's systems administrators figured out anything was wrong, they'd have pulled almost $3,000 out of the game. That was a year's rent for one night's work. His hands trembled as he flipped open a notebook to a new page and began to take notes with his left hand while his right hand worked the game.
He was just about to close his notebook and head for the cafe — he needed more dumplings on the way, could he stop for them? Could he afford to? But he needed to eat. And coffee. Lots of coffee — when the door splintered and smashed against the wall bouncing back before it was kicked open again, admitting the cold fluorescent light from outside into his tiny cave of a room. Three men entered his room and closed the door behind them, restoring the dark. One of them found the light switch and clicked it a few times without effect, then cursed in Mandarin and punched Matthew in the ear so hard his head spun around on his neck, contriving to bounce off the desk. The pain was blinding, searing, sudden.
"Light," one of the men commanded, his voice reaching Matthew through the high-pitched whine of his ringing ear. Clumsily, he fumbled for the desk-lamp behind the Indian comics, knocked it over, and then one of the men seized it roughly and turned it on, shining it full on Matthew's face, making him squint his watering eyes.
"You have been warned," the man who'd hit him said. Matthew couldn't see him, but he didn't need to. He knew the voice, the unmistakable Wenzhou accent, almost impossible to understand. "Now, another warning." There was the snick of a telescoping baton being unfurled, and Matthew flinched and tried to bring his arms up to shield his head before the weapon swung, but the other two had him by the arms now, and the baton whistled past his ear.
But it didn't smash his cheekbone, or his collarbone. Rather, it was the screen before him that smashed, sending tiny sharp fragments of glass out in a cloud that seemed to expand in slow motion, peppering his face and hands. Then another screen went. And another. And another. One by one, the man dispassionately smashed all eight screens, letting out little smoker's grunts as he worked. Then, with a much bigger, guttier grunt, he took hold of one end of the shelf and tipped it on its edge, sending the smashed monitors on it sliding onto the floor, taking the comics, the clamshell, the ashtray, all of it sliding onto the narrow bed that was jammed up against the desk, then onto the floor in a crash as loud as a basketball match in a glass factory.
Matthew felt the hands on his shoulders tighten as he was lifted out of his chair and turned to face the man with the accent, the man who had worked as the supervisor in Mr. Wing's factory, almost always silent. But when he spoke, they all jumped in their seats, never sure of whether his barely contained rage would break, whether someone would be taken off the factory floor and then returned to the dorm that night, bruised, cut, sometimes crying in the night for parents left behind back in the provinces.
The man's face was calm now, as though the violence against the machines had scratched the unscratchable itch that made him clench and unclench his fists all the time. "Matthew, Mr. Wing wants you to know that he thinks of you as a wayward son, and bears you no ill will. You are always welcome in his home. All you need to do is ask for his forgiveness, and it will be given." It was the longest speech Matthew had ever heard the man give, and it was delivered with surprising tenderness, so it was quite a shock when the man brought his knee up into Matthew's balls, hard enough that he saw stars.
The hands released him and he slumped to the floor, a strange sound in his ears that he realized after a moment must have been his voice. He was barely aware of the men moving around his tiny room as he gasped like a fish, trying to get air into his lungs, air enough to scream at the incredible, radiant pain in his groin.
But he did hear the horrible electrical noise as they tasered the box that held his computers, eight PCs on eight individual boards, stuck in a dented sheet-metal case he'd bought from the same old lady. The ozone smell afterwards sent him whirling back to his grandfather's little flat, the smell of the dust crisping on the heating coil that the old man only turned on when he came to visit. He did hear them gather up his notebooks and tread heavily on the PC case, and pull the shattered door shut behind them. The light from the desk lamp painted a crazy oval on the ceiling that he stared at for a long time before he got to his feet, whimpering at the pain in his balls.
The night guard was standing at the end of the corridor when he limped out into the night. He was only a boy, even younger than Matthew — sixteen, in a uniform that was two sizes too big for his skinny chest, and a hat that was always slipping down over his eyes, so he had to look up from under the brim like a boy wearing his father's hat.
"You okay?" the boy said. His eyes were wide, his face pale.
Matthew patted himself down, wincing at the pain in his ear, and the shooting, stabbing feeling in his neck.
"I think so," he said.
"You'll have to pay for the door," the guard said.
"Thanks," Matthew said. "Thanks so much."
"It's okay," the boy said. "It's my job."
Matthew clenched and unclenched his fists and headed out into the Shenzhen night, limping down the stairs and into the neon glow. It was nearly midnight, but Jiabin Road was still throbbing with music, food and hawkers and touts, old ladies chasing foreigners down the street, tugging at their sleeves and offering them "beautiful young girls" in English. He didn't know where he was going, so he just walked, fast, fast as he could, trying to walk off the pain and the enormity of his loss. The computers in his room hadn't cost much to build, but he hadn't had much to begin with. They'd been nearly everything he owned, save for his comics, a few clothes — and the war-axe. Oh, the war-axe. That was an entertaining vision, picking it up and swinging it over his head like a dark elf, the whistle of its blade slicing the air, the meaty thunk as it hit the men.
He knew it was ridiculous. He hadn't been in a fight since he was ten years old. He'd been a vegetarian until last year! He wasn't going to hit anyone with a war-axe. It was as useless as his smashed computers.
Gradually, he slowed his pace. He was out of the central area around the train station now, in the outer ring of the town center, where it was dark and as quiet as it ever got. He leaned against the steel shutters over a grocery market and put his hands on his thighs and let his sore head droop.
John, Matthew's father, had been unusual among their friends — a Cantonese who succeeded in the new Shenzhen. When Premier Deng changed the rules so that the Pearl River Delta became the world's factory, his family's ancestral province had filled overnight with people from the provinces. They'd "jumped into the sea"— left safe government factory jobs to seek their fortune here on the south Chinese coast — and everything had changed for Matthew's family. His grandfather, a Christian minister who'd been sent to a labor camp during the Cultural Revolution, had never made the adjustment — a problem that struck many of the native Cantonese, who seemed to stand still as the outsiders raced past them to become rich and powerful.
But not Matthew's father. The old man had started off as a driver for a shoe factory boss. He'd learned to drive on the job, nearly cracking up the car more than once, though the owner didn't seem to mind — after all, the boss had never ridden in a car before he'd made it big in Shenzhen. He got his break one day when the patternmaker was too sick to work and all production slowed to a crawl while the girls who worked on the line argued about the best way to cut the leather for a new order that had come in.
John loved to tell this story. He'd heard the argument go back and forth for days as the line jerked along slowly, and he'd sat on his chair and thought, and thought, and then he'd stood up and closed his eyes and pictured the calm ocean until the thunder of his heartbeat slowed to a normal beat. Then he'd walked into the owner's office and said, "Boss, I can show you how to cut those hides."
It was no easy task. The hides were all slightly different shapes — cows weren't identical, after all — and parts of them were higher grade than others. The shoe itself, an Italian men's loafer, needed six different pieces for each side, and only some of them were visible. The parts that were inside the shoe didn't need to come from the finest leather, but the parts outside did. All this Matthew's father had absorbed while sitting in his chair and listening to the arguments. He'd always loved to draw, always had a good head for space and design.
And before his boss could throw him out of the office, he'd plucked up his courage and seized a pen off the desk and rooted a crumpled cigarette package out of the trash — expensive foreign cigarettes, affected by all the factory owners as a show of wealth — torn it open and drawn a neat cowhide, and quickly shown how the shoes could be fit to the hide with a minimum of wastage, a design that would get ten pairs of shoes per hide.
"Ten?" the boss said.
"Ten," John said, proudly. He knew that the most that Master Yu, the regular patternmaker, ever got out of a hide was nine. "Eleven, if you use a big hide, or if you're making small shoes."
"You can cut this?"
Now, before that day, John had never cut a hide in his life, had no idea how to slice the supple leather that came back from the tanner. But that morning he'd risen two hours early, before anyone else was awake, and he'd taken his leather jacket, a graduation present from his father that he'd owned and treasured for ten years, and he'd taken the sharpest knife in the kitchen, and he'd sliced the jacket to ribbons, practicing until he could make the knife slice the leather in the same reliable, efficient arcs that his eyes and mind could trace over them.
"I can try," he said, with modesty. He was nervous about his boldness. His boss wasn't a nice man, and he'd fired many employees for insubordination. If he fired Matthew's father, he would be out a job and a jacket. And the rent was due, and the family had no savings.
The boss looked at him, looked at the sketch. "Okay, you try."
And that was the day that John stopped being Driver Fong and became Master Fong, the junior patternmaker at the Infinite Quality Shoe Factory. Less than a year later, he was the head patternmaker, and the family thrived.
Matthew had heard this story so many times growing up that he could recite it word-for-word with his father. It was more than a story: it was the family legend, more important than any of the history he'd learned in school. As stories went, it was a good one, but Matthew was determined that his own life would have an even better story still. Matthew would not be the second Master Fong. He would be Boss Fong, the first — a man with his own factory, his own fortune.
And like his father, Matthew had a gift.
Like his father, Matthew could look at a certain kind of problem and see the solution. And the problems Matthew could solve involved killing monsters and harvesting their gold and prestige items, better and more efficiently than anyone else he'd ever met or heard of.
Matthew was a gold farmer, but not just one of those guys who found themselves being approached by an internet cafe owner and offered seven or eight RMB to keep right on playing, turning over all the gold they won to the boss, who'd sell it on by some mysterious process. Matthew was Master Fong, the gold farmer who could run a dungeon once and tell you exactly the right way to run it again to get the maximum gold in the minimum time. Where a normal farmer might make fifty gold in an hour, Matthew could make five hundred. And if you watched Matthew play, you could do it too.
Mr. Wing had quickly noticed Matthew's talent. Mr. Wing didn't like games, didn't care about the legends of Iceland or England or India or Japan. But Mr. Wing understood how to make boys work. He displayed their day's take on big boards at both ends of his factory, treated the top performers to lavish meals and baijiu parties in private rooms at his karaoke club where there were beautiful girls. Matthew remembered these evenings through a bleary haze: a girl on either side of him on a sofa, pressed against him, their perfume in his nose, refilling his glass as Mr. Wing toasted him for a hero, extolling his achievements. The girls oohed and aahed and pressed harder against him. Mr. Wing always laughed at him the next day, because he'd pass out before he could go with one of the girls into an even more private room.
Mr. Wing made sure all the other boys knew about this failing, made sure that they teased "Master Fong" about his inability to hold his liquor, his shyness around girls. And Matthew saw exactly what Boss Wing was doing: setting Matthew up as a hero, above his friends, then making sure that his friends knew that he wasn't that much of a hero, that he could be toppled. And so they all farmed gold harder, for longer hours, eating dumplings at their computers and shouting at each other over their screens late into the night and the cigarette haze.
(Continues...)Excerpted from For the Win by Cory Doctorow, Patrick Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Copyright © 2010 Cory Doctorow. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Tor Teen; First Edition (May 11, 2010)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 480 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0765322161
- ISBN-13 : 978-0765322166
- Reading age : 13 - 18 years
- Lexile measure : 1070L
- Grade level : 9 - 12
- Item Weight : 1.37 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.79 x 1.57 x 8.48 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #662,594 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,919 in Teen & Young Adult Science Fiction
- #7,118 in Teen & Young Adult Social & Family Issue Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults; CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM, nonfiction about monopoly and creative labor markets; IN REAL LIFE, a graphic novel; and the picture book POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER. His latest novel is ATTACK SURFACE, a standalone adult sequel to LITTLE BROTHER. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
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Why write a Novel of Ideas when you could just write nonfiction essays, one commenter said. The reason is that we identify with the characters when written as fiction and the ideas permeate us more fully.
The best kind of novel would have the ideas, and the characters would also develop, like H.G. Wells Ann Veronica, or Jack Vance's character Wayness Tamm in the Araminta Station trilogy. But among the fifty-ish novels each of those two authors gave us, only one or two stand out as having the Character AND the Idea. Perhaps it is difficult to do both, and rare. Cory Doctorow gave us only the Idea, not the Character, in For the Win.
I thoroughly enjoyed For the Win. The idea kept me reading late into the night. I'd like to give the rest of this review to the Idea that Doctorow gave us in this book. The idea is compassion. It is not just a political stance, which could easily be catagorized as Liberal, with the value of Unions for exploited workers. But there are many scenes beginning about a third of the way through the book, and continuing through the end, that give an unconditionally compassionate perspective. For example, on p 179, the enlightened character Ashok says:
"You can talk all you want about 'Indian workers,' but until you find solidarity with all workers, you'll never be able to protect your precious Indian workers."
This is a perspective that does not (yet) belong to the Left or to the Right. What I want, I wish for others, even my competitors in other counteries, is a version of the Golden Rule, that has been around since Confucious and Leviticus and later Jesus. This is the Idea in For the Win. And I feel this Idea alone is worth five stars, and worth encouraging many people to read.
I am forty eight, and I bought a copy for my 22 year old daughter. She has struggled with optimism about the direction the world is going. If more people would read books like this, perhaps the enthusiasm of human solidarity would spread. That is the purpose of a Novel of Ideas. And if the people of the Writer's generation dismiss the Idea as something that will never happen, perhaps it will be the following generation, or 2000 years later that people still reading will say, "you know, I think he was right and let's do this Idea now."
For these reasons I feel this novel fits into the category of Wells' "Novel of Ideas," and this is an Idea worth supporting.
What holds it together is a mountain of research that comes through in the author’s respectable command of a wealth of complex topics. He explored exotic locales, economic theory, gaming culture and business management without losing me. A laudable effort considering that I am an MBA that has worked in the gaming industry for 10 years. I assume that labor economists would be less kind because that seems like the weakest link in the book. It also seems odd to go so deep into labor economics without bringing in more politics.
In a way this book shares a lot in common with the gaming industry. Games are so complex and have become so big that they all have flaws. Winning in the market comes down to two things. Is it interesting enough to stand out from the crowd and are the mistakes/flaws small enough to now take away from the overall experience. Taking the comparison the the extreme I would say For the Win is Assassin’s Creed.
Book focuses on workers strike organized by gold farmers from all over the world. Yes, there are lenghty explanations about economy, but what do you expect from a book about game workers? Maybe others wanted to read about game itself more, I got exactly what I expected. It could be better only if author researched more about money laundering.
Cory Doctorow books are quite enjoyable if you want to read about gamers/sysadmins. The only better ones about IT culture are about the programmers/hackers or are so completely out of touch with reality that I do not consider them to be books about IT :)
Cory delivers story without superheroes, without magically successful (if at all) characters and it is well enough researched to be fun to read even if you know how the reality looks.
As Americans we look at video games as things that gamers play. A few make millions but no one expects to make a living playing video games.
In foreign (less affluent) countries, "gold farmers" do make a subsistence living by exploiting features in the game to make in game gold which is translated into value outside of the game and which is gambled on by futures traders. It pays a bit more and is less risky than working in a factory all day where you're exposed to machines and chemicals and worker safety standards are almost non-existent.
We Americans have it so good (and we don't even know it).
I would've given the book 5 stars except for the huge chunks of narrative exposition that the author had to provide to explain the economics, union theory, and other factors behind the story. While necessary, I groan every time I found myself heading into a narrative valley for a period.
Top reviews from other countries
This novel does that a lot. That's great.
But I can't give it that 5th star because the characters just didn't reach me. The plot I loved, but the people just struck me as placeholders.
Nonetheless, despite that glitch I thoroughly enjoyed this "futuristic Dickens" of sorts.
I highly recommend it.
Mich hat die Geschichte sehr bewegt. Das Ende ist etwas abrupt.
Die Geschichte ist Episoden-maessig erzaehlt.
Ein sehr schoener, teilweise utopischer Roman ueber das digitale Zeitalter und den Wink mit dem Zaunpfahl nach gesellschaftlicher Veraenderung.
The only thing stopping me from giving this book 5 stars is the characterisation - in my opinion the wealthy, smart outcast in LA who supported the unionisation movement is a little generic; and the main antagonist (one of the Coca-Cola game runners) had a lot of potential - he was made out to be unlikeable through the book, but had one of the best sections when he made his millions, the pace of the writing style was a lot more intense in his parts of the story, short sentences & a more involved dialogue - 'Command central was a lie.'
I would recommend this book to MMO gamers or anyone interested in the possible economy of gaming; like I said this book has some very accurate and plausible possibilities for the near future. If it was a little longer with some of the characters being developed further I wouldn't protest in the slightest, it could have done with a little more back story and a less dated idea of a labour union, but it is no doubt worth a read!
The book charts a possible near future for mmorpgs, their creators and even the people who play and work within the virtual world.
It's fast pace and engaging characters make this a great read.

