For The Win by Cory Doctorow is another polemic novel, this time about economics and unions. Doctorow isn’t my favorite writer, but his stories are well paced and well written. There is rarely any confusion about who the characters are and what they are doing. But Doctorow has a habit of dropping in a chapter which reads like it came out of a textbook when he wants to introduce a topic. Unlike other books which work the school lesson into the plot, Doctorow just puts in a chapter which covers the topic and drops you out of the novel. So how was the economic text novel.

The main topic of the novel is gold farming. For those of you who aren’t familiar with MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game), let me define it for you. Within the online games, the characters start off with basically nothing. The characters then have to do missions of some sort to get gold (money). treasure (weapons) and experience (levelling up). The more gold, treasure and experience you have, the more you can do and the harder missions you can attempt. Generally players work in guilds that work together to attempt missions and help each other. But this creates some issues. What happens if you start a game months after your friends do, how do you catch up with them? This is where gold farming happens. There will be people who go in and do easy missions over and over and over again (for 12+ hours a day) to get gold, treasure and experience. The people then sell the gold, treasures or even characters to newer players so that they can have a head start on their characters. Gold farming happens a lot in third world companies (China, India, etc) where young people are hired for pennies an hour to play the game and then their boss sells the output of their work to wealthier people who want to short-cut getting ahead in the game.

So now that I’ve dropped a scholarly text into the review like Doctorow does, let’s continue with the review. The main characters are all involved in someway with gold farming. People involved in gold farming are not paid well or treated well. They are the basic definition of replaceable workers. The basic storyline is about an attempt to organize and unionize gold farmers. The companies and bosses are all bad and mean and evil and the unionizing people are all good and virtuous and selfless. The story only works with those stereotypes in place. In addition, there is a lot of discussion about work effort, organizing issues and economic activities (such as derivatives).

The characters are well written, but usually flat with little nuance to them. The bad guys are universally bad with no redeeming features at all. The storyline itself is a decently paced for the most part. There are a few times where we are in the past to show a character and it’s not obvious at first how far in the past we are. This causes some confusion when we see the character in the main storyline. Overall it’s a decent story that’s worth reading to pass the time, but I’m really hoping that Doctorow is able to write a better story at sometime. He has the tools and ability, but hasn’t really put it together. Mildly recommended.