For the Win

by Cory Doctorow

  In his heart of hearts, he knew it wasn’t her fault. He knew that he had some deficiency that caused him to live in the imaginary world he sometimes thought of as “theory-land,” the country where everything behaved as it was supposed to.

  After graduation, through his bachelor’s degree in pure math at Berkeley, his master’s in signal processing at Caltech, and the first year of a Ph.D. in economics at Stanford, he had occasion to date lots of beautiful women, and every time, he found himself ground to pulp between the gears of real world and theory-land. He gave up on women and his Ph.D. on a fine day in October, telling the prof who was supposed to be his advisor that he could find someone else to teach his freshman math courses, grade his papers, and answer his email.

  He walked off the Stanford campus and into the monied streets of Palo Alto, and he packed up his car and drove to his new job as chief economist for Coca-Cola’s games division, and finally, he found a real world that matched the beautiful elegance of theory-land.

  Coca-Cola ran or franchised anywhere from a dozen to thirty game-worlds at any given time. The number of games went up or down according to the brutal, elegant logic of the economics of fun:

  a certain amount of difficulty

  plus

  a certain amount of your friends

  plus

  a certain amount of interesting strangers

  plus

  a certain amount of reward

  plus

  a certain amount of opportunity

  equaled

  fun

  That was the equation that had come to him one day early in his second semester of the Ph.D. grind, a bolt of inspiration like the finger of God reaching down into his brain. The magic was that equals sign, just before the fun, because once you could express fun as a function of other variables, you could establish its relationship to those variables—if we reduce the difficulty and the number of your friends playing, can we increase the reward and make the fun stay the same?

  This line of thought drove him to phone in his resignation to his advisor and head straight home, where he typed and drew and scribbled and thought and thought and thought, and he phoned in sick the next day, and the next—and then it was the weekend, and he let his phone run down, shut off his email and IM, and worked, eating when he had to.

  By the time he found himself shoving fingerloads of butter into his mouth, having emptied the fridge of all else, he knew he was on to something.

  He called them the Prikkel Equations, and they described in elegant, pure, abstract math the relationship among all the variables that went into fun, and how fun equaled money, inasmuch as people would pay to play fun games, and would pay more for items that had value in those games.

  Technically, he should have sent the paper to his advisor. He’d signed a contract when he was accepted to the university giving ownership of all his ideas to the school forever, in exchange for the promise of someday adding “Ph.D.” to his name. It hadn’t seemed like a good idea at the time, but the alternative was the awesomely craptacular job market, and so he’d signed it.

  But he wasn’t going to give this to Stanford. He wasn’t going to give it to anybody. He was going to sell it.

  He didn’t go back to campus after that, but rather plunged into a succession of virtual worlds, plotting the time in hours it took him to achieve different tasks, and comparing that to the price of gold in the black-, grey-and white-market exchanges for in-game wealth.

  Each number slotted in perfectly, just where he’d expected it to go. His equations fit, and the world fit his equations. He’d finally found a place where the irrational was rendered comprehensible. And what’s more, he could manipulate the world using his equations.

  He decided to do a little fantasy trading: working from his equations, he’d predicted that the veeblefetzers—the money in MAD Magazine’s Shlabotnik’s Curse—was wildly undervalued. It was an incredibly fun game—or at least, it satisfied the fun equation—but for some reason, game money and elite items were going for peanuts. Sure enough, in 36 hours, his imaginary MAD Money was worth $130 in imaginary real money.

  Then he took his $130 stake and sank it into four other game currencies, spreading out his bets. Three of the four hit the jackpot, bringing his total up to $200 in imaginary dollars. Now he decided to spend some real money—he already knew that he wasn’t going back to campus, so that meant his grad student grant would vanish shortly. He’d need to pay the rent while he searched for a buyer for his equations.

  He’d already proven to his own satisfaction that he could predict the movement of game currencies, but now he wanted to branch out into the weirder areas of game economics: elite items, the rare prestige items that were insanely difficult to acquire in-game. Some of them had a certain innate value—powerful weapons and armor, ingredients for useful spells—but others seemed to hold value by sheer rarity or novelty. Why should a purple suit of armor cost ten times as much as the red one, given that both suits of armor had exactly the same play value?

  Of course, the purple one was much harder to come by. You had to either buy it with unimaginable mountains of gold—so players who saw your av sporting it would assume that you had played your ass off to earn for it—or pull off some fantastic stunt to get it, like doing a 60-player raid on a nigh-unkillable boss. Like a designer label on an otherwise unimpressive article of clothing, these items were valuable because people who saw them assumed they had to cost a lot or be hard to get, and thought more of the owner for having them. In other words, they cost a lot because…they cost a lot!

  So far, so good—but could you use Prikkel’s Equations to predict how much they’d cost? Connor thought so. He thought you could use a formula that combined the fun quotient of the game and the number of hours needed to get the item, and derive the “value” of any elite item from purple armor to gold pinstripes on your spaceship to a banana cream pie the size of an apartment block.

  Yes, it would work. Connor was sure of it. He started to calculate the true value of various elite items, casting about for undervalued items. What he discovered surprised him: while virtual currency tended to rest pretty close to its real value, plus or minus five percent, the value gap in elite items was gigantic. Some items routinely traded for two or three hundred percent of their real value—as predicted by his equations, anyway—and some traded at a pittance.

  Never for a moment did he doubt his equations, though a more humble or more cautious person might have. No, Connor looked at this paradoxical picture and the first thing that came into his head wasn’t “Oops.” It was BUY!

  And he bought. Anything that was undervalued, he bought, in vast quantities, so much that he had to create alts and secondaries in many worlds, because his primary characters couldn’t carry all the undervalued junk he was buying. He spent a hundred dollars—two hundred—three hundred, snapping up assets, spread-sheeting their nominal value. On paper, he was incredibly, unspeakably rich. On paper, he could afford to move out of his one-bedroom apartment that was a little too close to the poor and scary East Palo Alto for his suburban tastes, buy a McMansion somewhere on the peninsula, and go into business full time, spending his days buying magic armor and zeppelins and flaming hamburgers, and his evenings opening metaphorical checks.

  In reality, he was going broke. The theory said that these assets were wildly undervalued. The marketplace said otherwise. He’d cornered the market on several kinds of marvelous gewgaws, but no one seemed to actually want to buy them from him. He remembered Jenny Rosen, and all the crushing ways that theory and reality could sometimes stop communicating with one another.

  When the first red bills came in, he stuck them under his keyboard and kept buying. He didn’t need to pay his cellphone bill. He didn’t need his cellphone to buy magic lizards. His student loans? He wasn’t a student anymore, so he didn’t see why he should worry about them—they couldn’t kick him out of school. Car payments? Let them repo it (and they did, one night at 2AM, and he waved goo
d-bye to the little hunk of junk as the repo man drove it away, then turned back to his keyboard). Credit card bills? So long as there was one card that was still good, one card he could use to pay the subscription fees for his games, that was all that mattered.

  Living close to East Palo Alto had its advantages: for one thing, there were food-banks there, places where he could line up with other poor people to get giant bricks of government cheese, bags of day-old bread, boxes of irregular and unlovely root vegetables. He fried all the latter in an all-day starch festival and froze them, then he proceeded to live off of cheese and potato sandwiches. One morning, he realized that his entire body and everything that came out of it—breath, burps, farts, even his urine—smelled of cheese sandwiches. He didn’t care. There were ostrich plumes to buy.

  Disaster struck: he lost track of which credit card he was ignoring and had half of his accounts suspended when his monthly subscription fees bounced. Half his wealth, locked away. And the other card wasn’t far behind.

  He thought he could probably call his parents and grovel a bit and get a bus ticket to Petaluma, hole up in his folks’ basement and lick his wounds and be yet another small-town failure who came home with his tail between his legs. He’d need a roll of quarters and a payphone, of course, because his cellphone was now an inert, unpaid, debt-haunted brick. Luckily for him, East Palo Alto was the kind of place where you got lots of people who were too poor even to go into debt with a cell phone, people who also needed to use payphones.

  He tucked himself into his grimy bed on a Wednesday morning and thought, Tomorrow, tomorrow I will call them.

  But tomorrow he didn’t. And Friday he didn’t, though he was now out of government cheese and wasn’t eligible for more until Monday. He could eat potato sandwiches. He couldn’t buy assets anymore, but he was still tracking them, watching them trade and identifying the bargains he would buy, if only he had a little more liquidity, a little more cash.

  Saturday, he brushed his teeth, because he remembered to do that sometimes, and his gums bled and there were sores on the insides of his mouth and now he was ready to call his parents, but it was 11PM somehow, how did the day shoot past, and they went to bed at 9PM every night. He’d call them on Sunday.

  And on Sunday—on Sunday—on that magical, wonderful Sunday, on Sunday—

  THE MARKET MOVED!

  There he was, pricing assets, recording their values in his spreadsheet, and he realized that the asset he was booking—a steam-punk leather gasmask adorned with a cluster of huge leathery ear-trumpets and brass cogs and rivets (no better than a standard gasmask in the blighted ecotastrophe world that was Rising Seas, but infinitely cooler)—had already been entered onto his sheet weeks before. Indeed, he’d booked the mask when its real-world cash value was about $0.18, against the $4.54 the Equations predicted. And now he was booking it at $1.24, which meant that the 750 of them he had in inventory had just jumped from $135 to $930, a profit of $795.

  There was a strange sound. He realized after a moment that it was his stomach, growling for food. He could flip his gasmasks now, take the $795 onto one of his PayPal debit cards, and eat like a king. He might even be able to buy back some of his lost accounts and recover his assets.

  But Connor did not consider doing this, even for a second. He dashed to the sink and filled up three cooking pots with water and brought them back to his desk, along with a cup. He filled the cup and drank it, filled it and drank it, filling his stomach with water until it stopped demanding to be filled. This was California, after all, where people paid good money to go to “retreats” for “liquid fasting” and “detox.” He could wait out food for a day or two. After all, his Equations predicted that these things should go to $3,405. He was just getting started.

  And now the gasmasks were rising. He’d get up, go to the bathroom—his kidneys were certainly getting a workout!—and return to check the listings on the official exchange sites and the black-market ones where the gold-farmers hung out. He had a little formula for calculating the real price, using these two prices as a kind of beacon. No matter how he calculated it, his gasmasks were rising.

  And yes, some of his other assets were rising, too. A robot dog, up from $1.32 to $1.54, still pretty far off from the $8.17 he’d predicted, but he owned a thousand of the things, which meant that he’d just made $1,318.46 here, and he was just getting started.

  Up and up the prices went, as asset after asset attained liftoff, and he began to suspect that his asset-buying spree had coincided with an interworld depression across all virtual economies, which accounted for the huge quantities of undervalued assets he’d found lying around. There was probably an interesting cause for all those virtual economies slumping at once, but that was something to study another day. As it was, he was more interested in the fact that the economies were bouncing back while he was sitting on mountains of dirt-cheap imaginary gewgaws, knickknacks, tchotchkes, and white elephants, and that their values were taking off like crazy.

  And now it was time to convert some of those assets to money and some of that money to food, rent, and paid-off bills. His collection of articulated tentacles from Nemo’s Adventures on the Ocean Floor were maturing nicely—he’d bought them at $0.22, priced them at $3.21, and now they were trading at $3.27—so he dumped them, and regretted that he’d only bought 400 of them. Still, he managed to dump them for a handy $1,150 profit (by the time he’d sold 300 of them, the price had started to tip down again, as the supply of tentacles increased and the demand diminished).

  The money dribbled into his PayPal account and he used that to order three pizzas, a gallon of orange juice, and ten boxes of salad; pay off his suspended accounts; and send $400 to his landlord against the $3,500 he owed for two months’ rent, along with a begging letter promising to pay the rest off within a day or two.

  While he waited for the pizzas to arrive, he decided he’d better shower and shave and try to do something about his hair, which had started to go into dreadlocks from a month without seeing a hairbrush. In the end, he just cut the tangles out, and got dressed in something other than his filthy house coat for the first time in a week—marveling at how his jeans hung off his prominent hips, how his t-shirt clung to his wasted chest, his ribs like a xylophone through the pale skin. He opened all the windows, aware of the funk of body odor and stale computer-filtered air in his apartment, and realized as he did that it was morning, and thanked his lucky stars that he lived in a college town, where you could get a pizza delivered at 8:30AM.

  He barfed after eating the first pizza, getting most of it into the big pot he’d used to hold his drinking water, big chunks of crust and pepperoni, reeking of sour stomach-acid. He didn’t let that put him off. His PayPal account was now bulging, up to $50,000, and he was just getting started. He switched to salads and juice, figuring it would take a little while to get used to food again, and not having the time just now to take a long bio-break. His body would have to wait. He ordered an urn of coffee from a place that catered corporate meetings, the kind of thing that held 80 cups’ worth, and threw in a plate of sliced veggies and some pastries.

  Selling was getting easier now. The economies were bouncing back, and from the tone of the thank-you messages he got from his buyers, he understood that there was a kind of reverse panic in the air, a sense that players all over the world were starting to worry that if they didn’t buy this junk now, they’d never be able to buy it, because the prices would go up and up and up forever.

  And it was then that he had his second great flash, the second time that the finger of God reached down and touched his mind, with a force that shook him out of his chair and set him to pacing his living room like a tiger, muttering to himself.

  Once, when he’d been working on his master’s, he’d participated in a study for a pal in the economics department. They’d locked twenty-five grad students into a room and given each of them a poker chip. “You can do what ever you want with those chips,” the experimenter had said. “
But you might want to hang on to them. Every hour, on the hour, I’m going to unlock this door and give you twenty dollars for each poker chip you’re holding. I’ll do this eight times, for the next eight hours. Then I’ll unlock the door for a final time and you can go home and your poker chips will be worthless—though you’ll be able to keep all the money you’ve acquired over the course of the experiment.”

  He’d snorted and rolled his eyes at the other grad students, who were mostly doing the same. It was going to be a loooong eight hours. After all, everyone knew what the value of the poker chips were: $160 in the first hour, $140 in the next, $120 in the next and so on. What would be the point of trading a poker chip to anyone else for anything less than it was worth?

  For the first hour, they all sat around and griped about how boring it all was. Then, the experimenter walked back into the room with a tray of sandwiches and 25 $20 bills. “Poker chips, please,” he said, and they dutifully held out their chips, and one by one, each received a crisp new $20 bill.

  “One down, seven to go,” someone said, once the experimenter had left. The sandwiches were largely untouched. They waited. They flirted in a bored way, or made small talk. The hour ticked past.

  Then, at 55 minutes past the hour, one guy, a real joker with red hair and mischievous freckles, got out of the beat-up old orange sofa turned to the prettiest girl in the room, a lovely Chinese girl with short hair and homemade clothes that reminded Connor of Jenny’s fashion, and said, “Rent me your poker chip for five minutes? I’ll pay you twenty dollars.”

  That cracked the entire room up. It was the perfect demonstration of the absurdity of sitting around, waiting for the $20 hour. The Chinese girl laughed, too, and they solemnly traded. In came the grad student, five minutes later, with another wad of twenties and a cooler filled with smoothies in tetrapaks. “Poker chips, please,” he said, and the joker held up his two chips. They all grinned at one another, like they’d gotten one over on the student, and he grinned a little too and handed two twenties to the redhead. The Chinese girl held up her extra twenty, showing that she had the same as everyone else. Once he’d gone, Red gave her back her chip. She pocketed it and went back to sitting in one of the dusty old armchairs.