For the Win: A Novel - Hardcover

Doctorow, Cory

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765322161 ISBN 13: 9780765322166

Verlag: Tor Teen, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

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

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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For the Win

By Cory Doctorow, Patrick Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Tom Doherty Associates

Copyright © 2010 Cory Doctorow
All 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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Tor Teen
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0765322161
• ISBN 13: 9780765322166
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 480
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar