{"id":51,"date":"2012-03-04T20:33:07","date_gmt":"2012-03-05T04:33:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/thefetterblog\/?p=51"},"modified":"2012-03-04T20:33:07","modified_gmt":"2012-03-05T04:33:07","slug":"for-the-win-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/thefetterblog\/2012\/03\/04\/for-the-win-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"For The Win: Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past few days I’ve been reading For The Win<\/a><\/em>, written by Cory Doctorow<\/a>. Doctorow is a British-Canadian blogger, journalist, and science fiction writer who strongly supports liberal copyright laws and creative commons. For The Win is the second book by Doctorow and focuses on massively\u00a0multiplayer\u00a0online role-playing games<\/a> (mmorpg) with a touch upon topics of\u00a0economics, labor rights, gold farming and power-leveling. Part 1 of the book introduces the stories of three people: Matthew Fong, a\u00a0Chinese\u00a0boy who is an incredibly talented gold-farmer but has to deal with the established gold-farming gangs; Leonard “Wei-Dong” Goldberg, an American boy who spends all the time he can playing games with his in-game\u00a0Chinese\u00a0friends and guild members, who are gold-farmers and power levelers, but Leonard has to deal with his parent’s apposition\u00a0to playing and eventually runs away. Mala, or General Robotwallah, is a Indian girl who\u00a0discovers\u00a0that she is a natural\u00a0strategist\u00a0in online games, and forms an online make-shift army out of the players in a local cafe, eventually getting them all hired by a Mr. Banerjee who has her hunt down and kill rival gold-farmers, until her army is defeated by Big Sister Nor, who leads the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web. The three character’s stories alternate chapters, each with their own themes.<\/p>\n

This book was a new experience for me, and a\u00a0pleasant\u00a0one. I am already a huge fan of science fiction and this book was a very good addition to what I have already read. I’m only done with part 1, but I find the issues it brings up already to be quiet interesting. The author sets the stage for a very pro-labor rights message from the beginning, detailing the hardship faced by gold-farmers. The labor rights of gold-farmers and their ilk are always at stake, as the entire industry is illegal in most games terms-of-use. Even with that knowledge, I still feel like action needs to be taken, for basic human rights. Even with the obvious labor-rights issues, I found that my dislike was focused on the brutal members of the gold-farming communities and not the\u00a0corporations\u00a0that run the games, which was a nice change from many science fiction books these days. The story of Leonard is of particular interest to me, as he shows the particular issue of game addiction; his obsession with gaming is ruining his real-life relationships, but he does not seem to care. The author has yet to make this actually seem like a problem though, which worries me about how his story might continue. Overall, I like the book and the stories, and look forward to\u00a0continued\u00a0reading.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the past few days I’ve been reading For The Win, written by Cory Doctorow. Doctorow is a British-Canadian blogger, journalist, and science fiction writer who strongly supports liberal copyright laws and creative commons. For The Win is the second … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"qubely_global_settings":"","qubely_interactions":"","kk_blocks_editor_width":"","_kiokenblocks_attr":"","_kiokenblocks_dimensions":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"gutentor_comment":3,"qubely_featured_image_url":null,"qubely_author":{"display_name":"sfetter","author_link":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/thefetterblog\/author\/sfetter\/"},"qubely_comment":3,"qubely_category":"Uncategorized<\/a>","qubely_excerpt":"Over the past few days I’ve been reading For The Win, written by Cory Doctorow. Doctorow is a British-Canadian blogger, journalist, and science fiction writer who strongly supports liberal copyright laws and creative commons. For The Win is the second … Continue reading →","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/thefetterblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/thefetterblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/thefetterblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/thefetterblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/thefetterblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/thefetterblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/thefetterblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions\/52"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/thefetterblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/thefetterblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/thefetterblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}