/ / For The Win, News

The current New Scientist has a fine interview and feature about my latest novel, For the Win:

What do gold farmers think about their lot?
The gold farmers are a lot less worried about being exploited in real life than they are about being hunted mercilessly in the game. They encounter an awful lot of racism when they move around in games. Anyone with a Chinese name or talking in Chinese is immediately accused of being a gold farmer. If you are on a server where players can attack each other, people will try to kill you. They did have stories about being exploited, too, but a lot of them are 17 and still can’t believe they’re being paid to play video games all day.

When do you set the action in For the Win?

At a time when 8 out of 10 of the world’s top economies are virtual economies. Scarily, in 2001 the game EverQuest was ranked 77 in the world – on par with Russia as it was then.

Cory Doctorow: My computer says no

Review:

Globe and Mail

This is an ambitious tale featuring a dozen tech-savvy narrators from around the world who all make their livelihoods playing and scamming video games. The cumulative effect of so many interwoven stories is that new ones feel like a layer of the previous. While each of the narrators could have easily been the star of his or her own book, they are instead strands of Doctorow’s global web, proving that everything’s interconnected.

Emily Pohl-Weary, The Globe and Mail