For the Win

by Cory Doctorow

  Mala didn’t like to disagree with her mother, and she’d never done so in front of strangers, but—

  But this was her army, and she was their general. She knew what made them tick, and they’d heard Mr. Banerjee announce that she would be paid in cash for their services. They believed in fairness. They wouldn’t work for food while she worked for a lakh (a lakh—one hundred thousand rupees! The whole family lived on two hundred rupees a day!) of cash.

  “Mamaji,” she said, “it wouldn’t be right or fair.” It occurred to Mala that Mr. Banerjee had mentioned the money in front of the army. He could have been more discreet. Perhaps it was deliberate. “And they’d know it. I can’t earn this money for the family on my own, Mamaji.”

  Her mother closed her eyes and breathed through her nose, a sign that she was trying to keep hold of her temper. If Mr. Banerjee hadn’t been present, Mala was sure she would have gotten a proper beating, the kind she’d gotten from her father before he left them, when she was a naughty little girl in the village. But if Mr. Banerjee wasn’t here, she wouldn’t have to talk back to her mother, either.

  “I’m sorry for this, Mr. Banerjee,” Mamaji said, not looking at Mala. “Girls of this age, they become rebellious—impossible.”

  Mala thought about a future in which instead of being General Robotwallah, she had to devote her life to begging and bullying her army into playing with her so that she could keep all the money they made for her family, while their families went hungry and their mothers demanded that they come home straight from school. When Mr. Banerjee mentioned his gigantic sum, it had conjured up a vision of untold wealth, a real house, lovely clothes for all of them, Mamaji free to spend her afternoons cooking for the family and resting out of the heat, a life away from Dharavi and the smoke and the stinging eyes and sore throats.

  “I think your little girl is right,” Mr. Banerjee said, with quiet authority, and Mala’s entire family stared at him, speechless. An adult, taking Mala’s side over her mother? “She is a very good leader, from what I can see. If she says her people need paying, I believe that she is correct.” He wiped at his mouth with a handkerchief. “With all due respect, of course. I wouldn’t dream of telling you how to raise your children, of course.”

  “Of course…” Mamaji said, as if in a dream. Her eyes were downcast, her shoulders slumped. To be spoken to this way, in her own home, by a stranger, in front of her children! Mala felt terrible. Her poor mother. And it was all Mr. Banerjee’s fault: he’d mentioned the money in front of her army, and then he’d brought her mother to this point—

  “I will find a way to get them to fight without payment, Mamaji—” But she was cut short by her mother’s hand, coming up, palm out to her.

  “Quiet, daughter,” she said. “If this man, this gentleman, says you know what you’re doing, well, then I can’t contradict him, can I? I’m just a simple woman from the village. I don’t understand these things. You must do what this gentleman says, of course.”

  Mr. Banerjee stood and smoothed his suit back into place with the palms of his hands. Mala saw that he’d gotten some chana on his shirt and lapel, and that made her feel better somehow, like he was a mortal and not some terrible force of nature who’d come to destroy their little lives.

  He made a little namaste at Mamaji, hands pressed together at his chest, a small hint of a bow. “Good night, Mrs. Vajpayee. That was a lovely supper. Thank you,” he said. “Good night, General Robotwallah. I will come to the cafe tomorrow at three o’clock to talk more about your missions. Good night, Gopal,” he said, and her brother looked up at him, guiltily, eggplant still poking out of the corner of his mouth.

  Mala thought that Mamaji might slap her once the man had left, but they all went to bed together without another word, and Mala snuggled up to her mother the same as she did every night, stroking her long hair. It had been shining and black when they left the village, but a year later, it was shot through with grey and it felt wiry. Mamaji’s hand caught hers and stilled it, the calluses on her fingers rough.

  “Sleep, daughter,” she murmured. “You have an important job, now. You need your sleep.”

  The next morning, they avoided one another’s eyes, and things were hard for a week, until she brought home her first pay packet, folded carefully in the sole of her shoe. Her army had carved through the enemy forces like the butcher’s cleaver parting heads from chickens. There had been a large bonus in their pay packet, and even after she’d paid Mrs. Dotta and bought everyone masala Coke at the Hotel Hajj next door, and paid the army their wages, there were almost 2,000 rupees left, and she took Mamaji into the smallest sorting room in the loft of the factory, up the ladder. Mamaji’s eyes lit up when she saw the money, and she’d kissed Mala on the forehead and taken her in the longest, fiercest hug of their lives together.

  And now it was all wonderful between them. Mamaji had begun to look for a place for them further toward the middle of Dharavi, the old part where the tin and scrap buildings had been gradually replaced with brick ones, where the potters’ kilns smoked a clean woodsmoke instead of the dirty, scratchy plastic smoke near Mr. Kunal’s factory. Mala had new school clothes, new shoes, and so did Gopal, and Mamaji had new brushes for her hair and a new sari that she wore after her workday was through, looking pretty and young, the way Mala remembered her from the village.

  And the battles were glorious.

  She entered the cafe out of the melting, dusty sun of late day and stood in the doorway. Her army was already assembled, practicing on their machines, passing gupshup in the shadows of the dark, noisy room, or making wet eyes at one another through the dimness. She barely had time to grin and then hide the grin before they noticed her and climbed to their feet, standing straight and proud, saluting her.

  She didn’t know which one of them had begun the saluting business. It had started as a joke, but now it was serious. They vibrated at attention, all eyes on her. They had on better clothes, they looked well-fed. General Robotwallah was leading her army to victory and prosperity.

  “Let’s play,” she said. In her pocket, her handphone had the latest message from Mr. Banerjee with the location of the day’s target. Yasmin was at her usual place, at Mala’s right hand, and at her left sat Fulmala, who had a bad limp from a leg that she’d broken that hadn’t healed right. But Fulmala was smart and fast, and she grasped the tactics better than anyone in the cafe except Mala herself. And Yasmin, well, Yasmin could make the boys behave, which was a major accomplishment, since left to their own they liked to squabble and one-up each other, in a reckless spiral that always ended badly. But Yasmin could talk to them in a way that was stern like an older sister, and they’d fall into line.

  Mala had her army, her lieutenants, and her mission. She had her machine, the fastest one in the cafe, with a bigger monitor than any of the others, and she was ready to go to war.

  She touched up her displays, rolled her head from side to side, and led her army to battle again.

  Gold. It’s all about gold.

  But not regular gold, the sort of thing you dig out of the ground. That stuff was for the last century. There’s not enough of it, for one thing: we haven’t pulled all that much out of the Earth, not in the whole of human history. And, curiously, there’s also too much of it: all the certificates of gold ownership issued into the world add up to a cube twice that size. Some of those certificates don’t amount to anything—and no one knows which ones. No one has independently audited Fort Knox since the 1950s. For all we know, it’s empty, the gold smuggled out and sold, put in a vault, sold as certificates, then stolen again and put into another vault, used as the basis for more certificates.

  So, not regular gold.

  Virtual gold.

  Call it what you want: in one game it’s called “Credits” in another, “Volcano Bucks.” There are groats, Disney Dollars, cowries, moolah, Fool’s Gold, and a bazillion other kinds of gold out there. Unlike real gold, there’s no vault of reserves backing the certif
icates. Unlike money, there’s no government involved in their issue.

  Virtual gold is issued by companies. Game companies. Game companies who declare, “So many gold pieces can buy this piece of armor,” or “So many credits can buy this space ship,” or “So many Jools can buy this zeppelin.” And because they say it, it is true. Countries and their banks have to mess around with the ugly business of convincing citizens to believe what they say. The government may say, “This social security check will provide for all your needs in a month,” but that doesn’t mean that the merchants who supply those needs will agree.

  Companies don’t have this problem. When Coca-Cola says that 76 groats will buy you one dwarvish axe in Svartalfheim Warriors, that’s it: the price of an axe is 76 groats. Don’t like it? Go play somewhere else.

  Virtual money isn’t backed by gold or governments: it’s backed by fun. So long as a game is fun, players somewhere will want to buy into it, because as fun as the game is, it’s always more fun if you’re one of the haves, with all the awesome armor and killer weapons, than if you’re some lowly noob have-not with a dagger, fighting your way up to your first sword.

  But where there’s money to be spent, there’s money to be made. For some players, the most fun game of all is the game that carves them out a slice of the pie. Not all the action belongs to the giant companies up in their tall offices and the games they make or even the scrappy startups working out of grimy offices. Plenty of us can get in on the action from down below, where the grubby little people are. We can make, buy and sell goods and money from the games

  Of course, this makes the companies bonkers. They’re big daddy, they know what’s best for their worlds. They are in control. They design the levels and the difficulty to make it all perfectly balanced. They design the puzzles. They decree that light elves can’t talk to dark elves, that players on Russian servers can’t hop onto the Chinese servers, and that it would take the average player 32 hours to attain the Von Clausewitz Drive and 48 hours to earn the Order of the Armored Penguin. If you don’t like it, you’re supposed to leave. You’re not supposed to just buy your way out of it. Or if you do, you should have the decency to buy it from them.

  And here’s a little something they won’t tell you, these Gods of the Virtual: they can’t control it. Kids, crooks, and weirdos all over the world have riddled their safe little terrarium worlds with tunnels leading to the great outdoors. There are multiple competing interworld exchanges. Want to swap out your Zombie Mecha wealth for a fully loaded spaceship and a crew of jolly space pirates to crew it? Ten different gangs want your business—they’ll fix you right up with someone else’s spaceship and take your mecha, arms, and ammo into inventory for the next person who wants to emigrate to Zombie Mecha from some other magical world, at a fraction of what the gamerunners will charge you, and in a variety of packages more tailored than anything that is officially sanctioned.

  And the Gods are powerless to stop it. For every barrier they put up, there are hundreds of smart, motivated players of the Big Game who will knock it down.

  You’d think it’d be impossible, wouldn’t you? After all, these aren’t mere games of cops and robbers, played out in real cities filled with real people. They don’t need an all-points bulletin to find a fugitive at large: every person in the world is in the database, and they own the database. They don’t need a search warrant to find the contraband hiding under your floorboards: the floorboards, the contraband, the house, and you are all in the database—and they own the database.

  It should be impossible, but it isn’t, and here’s why: the biggest sellers of gold and treasure, levels and experience in the worlds are the game companies themselves. Oh, they don’t call it power-leveling and gold-farming—they package it with prettier, more palatable names, like “Accelerated Progress Bonus Pack” and “All Together Now” and lots of other redonkulous names that don’t fool anyone.

  But the Gods aren’t happy with merely turning a buck on players who are too lazy to work their way up through the game. They’ve got a much, much weirder game in play. They sell gold to people who don’t even play the game. That’s right: if you’re a big shot finance guy and you’re looking for somewhere to stash a million bucks where it will do some good, you can buy a million dollars’ worth of virtual gold, hang onto it as the game grows and becomes more and more fun, as the value of the gold rises and rises, and then you can sell it back for real money through the official in-game banks, pocketing a chunky profit for your trouble.

  So while you’re piloting your mecha, swinging your axe, or commanding your space fleet, there’s a group of weird old grown-ups in suits in fancy offices all over the world watching your play eagerly, trying to figure out if the value of in-game gold is going to go up or down. When a game starts to suck, everyone rushes to sell out their holdings, getting rid of the gold as fast as they can before its value is obliterated by bored gamers switching to a competing service. And when the game gets more fun, well, that’s an even bigger frenzy. The bidding wars kick up to high gear, every banker in the world trying to buy the same gold for the same world.

  Is it any wonder that eight of the twenty largest economies in the world are in virtual countries? And is it any wonder that playing has become such a serious business?

  Matthew stood outside the door of the internet cafe, breathing deeply. On the walk over, he’d managed to calm down a little, but as he drew closer, he became more and more convinced that Boss Wing’s boys would be waiting for him there, and all his friends would be curled up on the ground, beaten unconscious. He’d brought four of the best players with him out of Boss Wing’s factory, and he knew that Boss Wing wasn’t happy about that at all.

  He was hyperventilating, his head swimming. He still hurt. It felt like he had a soccer ball–sized red sun of pain burning in his underwear and one of the things he wanted most and least to do was find a private spot to have a look in there. There was a bathroom in the cafe, so that was that, it was time to go inside.

  He walked up the four flights of stairs painfully, passing under the gigantic murals from gamespace, avoiding the plastic plants on each landing that reeked of piss from players who didn’t want to wait for the bathroom. From the third floor up, he was enveloped in the familiar cloud of body odor, cigarette smoke, and cursing that told him he was on his way to his true home.

  In the doorway, he paused and peered around, looking for any sign of Boss Wing’s goons, but it was business as usual: rows and rows of tables with PCs on them, a few couples sharing machines, but mostly, it was boys playing, skinny, with their shirts rolled up over their bellies to catch any breeze that might happen through the room. There were no breezes, just the eddies in the smoke caused by the growl of all those PC fans whining as they sucked particulate-laden smoky air over the superheated motherboards and monster video cards.

  He slunk past the sign-in desk, staffed tonight by a new kid, someone else just arrived from the provinces to find his fortune here in bad old Shenzhen. Matthew wanted to grab the kid and carry him to the city limits, explaining all the way that there was no fortune to be found here anymore, it all belonged to men like Boss Wing. Go home, he thought at the boy, Go home, this place is done.

  His boys were playing at their usual table. They had made a pyramid from alternating layers of Double Happiness cigarette packs and empty coffee cups. They looked up as he neared them, smiling and laughing at some joke. Then they saw the look on his face and they fell silent.

  He sat down at a vacant chair and stared at their screens. They’d been playing, of course. They were always playing. When they worked in Boss Wing’s factory, they’d pull an eighteen-hour shift and then they’d relax by playing some more, running their own characters through the dungeons they’d been farming all day long. It’s why Boss Wing had such an easy time recruiting for his factory: the pitch was seductive. “Get paid to play!”

  But it wasn’t the same when you worked for someone else.

  He tried t
o find the words to start and couldn’t.

  “Matthew?” It was Yo, the oldest of them. Yo actually had a family, a wife and a young daughter. He’d left Boss Wing’s factory and followed Matthew.

  Matthew stared at his hands, took a deep breath, and made a decision: “Sorry, I just had a little fight on the way over here. I’ve got good news, though: I’ve got a way to make us all very rich in a very short time.” And, from memory, Master Fong described the way he’d found into the rich dungeon of Svartalfheim Warriors. He commandeered a computer and showed them, showed them how to shave the seconds off the run, where to make sure to stop and grab and pick up. And then they each took up a machine and went to work.

  In time, the ache in his pants faded. Someone gave him a cigarette, then another. Someone brought him some dumplings. Master Fong ate them without tasting them. He and his team were at work, and they were making money, and someday soon, they’d have a fortune that would make Boss Wing look like a small-timer.

  Sometime during the shift, his phone rang. It was his mother. She wanted to wish him a happy birthday. He had just turned seventeen.

  Wei-Dong’s game suspension lasted all of twenty minutes. That’s how long it took him to fake a migraine, get a study pass, sneak into the resource center, beat the network filter, and log on. It was getting very late back in China, but that was okay; the boys stayed up late when they were working, and they were glad to have him.

  Wei-Dong’s real name wasn’t Wei-Dong, of course. His real name was Leonard Goldberg. He’d chosen Wei-Dong after looking up the meanings of Chinese names and coming up with Strength of the East, which he liked the sound of. This system for picking names worked well for the Chinese kids he knew—when their parents immigrated to the States, they’d just pick some English name and that was it. Why not? Why was it better to pick a name because your grandfather had it than because you liked the sound of it?