When I initially found out that our reading was going to be about games, I didn’t know what to expect.  I thought, “Oh no, here comes another technical, game jargon filled reading…”  However, immediately after beginning the reading, I was completely engrossed in the story.  Cory Doctorow, author of For the Win, starts off his novel with introducing Matthew, the main character, and his obsession with games. Through the novel, Doctorow writes stories of multiple different characters including Matthew, Wei-Dong (Leonard), and Mala.  Each has a different life and a different story, but all have one thing in common–they play and love video games.

Doctorow’s reading is so fun to read because it is filled with vivid, animated images.  While reading his text, I could literally see what was going on in my head, and could picture Matthew’s desk with the nine monitors, comic books, dumplings, etc.  Doctorow writes with such life and descriptive adjectives, painting the reader a picture of the scenes and settings.

Doctorow is amazing at weaving in the story with the characters’ side commentary and opinions.  While reading the text, I laughed and chuckled at their internal thoughts.  Doctorow separates these internal thoughts and side commentary through starting a new paragraph and italicizing the text.  These side comments and opinions gave me and other readers insight into their thoughts and showed us a more in-depth and intimate look at the character themselves.

Within the story, Doctorow weaves in Matthew’s history and background, talking about how Matthew got into his games, and some family background about his father and how he successfully moved up the economic ladder at the expense of his prized leather jacket.  In part one, Doctorow also includes an excerpt of Matthew in action (playing video games), when telling the reader about his multiple computer monitors.  However, it is not until we read about the story of Wei-Dong that we read a play-by-play of what exactly goes on during the playing of video games.

We read about how he is a part of the “fighter class,” and Doctorow also includes dialogue and interaction between Wei-Dong and other video game users while they are playing their game.  Wei-Dong talks to his fellow gamers through a Bluetooth headset.  Doctorow also includes an economic element of currency.  In the story of Wei-Dong Goldberg, Doctorow talks about currency both in the game and in real life.  At the end of the excerpt about Wei-Dong, Wei-Dong unsucessfully attempts to hide from his father that he was playing video games so late at nigh (2:30 A.M. to be exact…And it was a school night!)  Wei-Dong’s father firmly tells his son that they will discuss it in the morning, takes away his laptop, and leaves implying that Wei-Dong is grounded for a long time.

Throughout part one, Doctorow continues to talk about Matthew’s, Wei-Dong’s, and Mala’s life, and their fascination and passion for video games.  While reading the text, Doctorow takes the reader on an adventure with each of them, entertaining readers with humor.  All in all, part one was surprisingly a very fun read even though I admit I was skeptical about how technical and nerdy the reading was going to be.  Though this sounds nerdy myself, I am kind of excited to read part two and see what else Doctorow has to write about video games!