'For The Win' was incredibly exciting and inspiring. It is not the first book of yours that made me feel that way, but it was the difference in motivating me to become a small part of the movement to use gold farming for development and freedom. The kind of stuff you were writing about seems so possible.

So I've created a wiki where people might work together to undertake the quest. I wanted to let you know because of your huge role in this already.

My next plan is to help build a free online marketplace where some kind of 'fair trade' gold/power-leveling can be exchanged. I'd like to make this website as open and collaborative as possible so that anyone can improve and build on it. Then to help gold farmers get access to computers, games and bandwidth that don't come with the same requirements of their current bosses - donated for free, that they can use on their own terms.

There will be many challenges on the way but I believe it will be worth it. As you said, we can all lead ourselves.

Here's a two-part video interview that Ken MacLeod conducted with me earlier this week at the Edinburgh Book Festival for the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum. We chatted gold farming, post-industrial manufacturing, For the Win, UK riots and social media censorship.

Anastasia Salter gave a presentation on my novel For the Win at the Children's Literature 2011 conference; I haven't seen the presentation, but her notes (embedded above) are fascinating!

It is for young adults – it’s an adventure-action story, it’s not that complicated. But it’s very well done and conveys a lot of really interesting economic ideas very well. For instance there’s the impact of globalisation, the possibility of bubbles occurring in economic systems, the idea of the race to the bottom, of sweatshops and the role of unionisation. Really key economic ideas.

Of course there are a lot of economic ideas that are not in the book. I would also say that Cory is well to the left of where I am. He thinks trade unions are incredibly important – I’m not so sure. But I was very impressed by the way he could take this novel and convey all these economic ideas without slowing the action down. There have been people who have tried to create works of fiction with an economic message – notably Ayn Rand, who has just had a film made about her work – but Cory has really done it very well. It’s a tremendous and very admirable achievement.

Have there been any strange moments?

There've been a couple pretty weird ones. I've had two funny misunderstandings. A friend of mine was interviewing me for the Guardian over Skype at six in the morning in San Francisco. It was later in the day for her, obviously, and luckily she's a good friend. I forgot the camera was on and answered the phone naked. I'd been up since five but I hadn't gotten dressed yet.

The other funny bit was when a guy came to my signing in Austin and I said, "What would you like in your book," and he said, "Drama Hobbit." I said, "Drama Hobbit?" And he said, "Yeah," so I drew him the most dramatic Hobbit I could. I'm not much of a drawer and I said, "There you go!" And he said, "No, no, draw Muhammad." Well, nobody knows what he looks like...