For the Win

by Cory Doctorow

  This was canned dialog, of course. No Turk could ever bring himself to type anything that hokey. The farmer NPC had a whole range of snappy answers to stupid questions. The trick to invoking a Turk was to get outside the box.

  “Do you like farming?”

  “Ay-yuh, you might say I do. It’s a good living—when the sun shines! Hee hee!”

  Wei-Dong rolled his eyes. Who wrote this stuff? “What problems do you have as a farmer?”

  “Oh, it’s a good living—when the sun shines! Hee hee!”

  Wei-Dong smiled a little. Once the NPC started repeating itself, a Turk would be summoned. The farmer seemed to twitch a little.

  “Do you have any problems apart from lack of sunshine?”

  “Oh, youngster, you don’t want to hear an old farmer’s complaints. Many and many a day I have toiled in these fields and my hands are tired. Let’s speak of more pleasant things, if you please.” That was more like it. The dialog was the kind of thing an enthusiastic role-playing Turk would come up with, and that fit the profile of the Turk he was after.

  “Is your name Jake Snider?” he typed.

  The character didn’t move for a second. “I ken not this Jake Snider, youngster. You’d best be getting on with your chores, now.”

  “I think you are Jake Snider and I think you know that you’re not getting a fair deal out of Coke. You’re pulling down more hours than ever, but your pay is way down. Why do you suppose that is? Did you know that Coca-Cola Games just had its best quarter, ever? And that the entire executive group got a twenty-percent raise? Did you know that Coke systematically rotates Turks who make too much money out of duty, replacing them with newbies who don’t know how to maximize their revenue?”

  The farmer started to walk away, rake over his shoulder. Wei-Dong followed.

  “Wait! Here’s the thing. It doesn’t have to be this way! Workers can organize and demand a better deal from their bosses. Workers are organizing. You give it two more months and you’ll be out on the street. Isn’t your pay and your dignity worth fighting for?

  The farmer was headed into his house. Wei-Dong thought for a second that he was talking to the NPC again, that the Turk had logged out. But no, there was a little clumsiness in the farmer’s movements, a little hesitation. There was still someone home. “I know you can’t talk to me in-game. Here’s an email address—D9FA754516116E89833A5B92CE055E19BCD2FA7@gmail.com. Send me a message and we’ll talk in private.”

  He held his breath. The Turk could have been ratting him out to game management, in which case his toon would be nuked in a matter of minutes and the Webblies would be out one more character and one more prepaid card. But the NPC went into his house and nothing happened. Wei-Dong felt a flutter in his chest, and then another, a few minutes later, when his email pinged.

  > Tell me more

  It was unsigned, but he knew who it came from.

  “You should go to Hong Kong,” Lu said to Jie, holding her hand tightly and staring into her eyes. “You can do the show from there. It’s safer.”

  Jie turned her head and blew out a stream of air. She squeezed his hand. “I know that you mean the best, Tank, but I won’t do it and I want you to stop talking about it. I’m a Webbly, just like you, just like everyone here. Sure, I can broadcast from Hong Kong, technically, but what would I broadcast about? I’m a journalist, Tank. I need to be here to see what’s going on, to report on it. I can’t do that from HK.”

  “But it’s not safe—”

  She cut him off with a chopping gesture. “Of course it’s not safe! I haven’t been interested in safety since the day I went on the air. You’re not safe. My factory girls aren’t safe. The Webblies on the picket lines aren’t safe. Why should I be safe?”

  Lu bit down on the words: because I love you. Secretly, he was relieved. He didn’t know what he’d do if Jie was in Hong Kong and he was in Shenzhen. The last of her safe-houses, another flat in a handshake building, was crowded with Webblies, forty boys all studiously ignoring them, but he knew they were listening in. They slept in shifts here, forty at a time, while eighty more went out to work at friendly net-cafes, taking care never to send more than two or three into any one cafe lest they draw attention to themselves. Just the day before, two boys had been followed out of a cafe by a couple of anonymous hard men who methodically kicked the everloving crap out of them, right on the public street, sending one to the hospital.

  “You know it’s only a matter of time until this place is blown,” is what Lu said. “Someone will get careless and be followed home, or one of the neighbors will start to talk about all the boys who trek in and out of the flat at all hours, and then—”

  “And then we’ll move to another one,” she said. “I have been renting and blowing off apartments for longer than you’ve been killing trolls. So long as the advertising keeps on paying, I’ll keep on earning, and if I keep on earning, I can keep on renting.”

  “How long will the advertisers pay for you to spend three hours every night telling factory girls to fight back against their bosses?”

  A smile played over her lips, the secret, confident smile that always melted his heart. “Oh, Tank,” she said. “The advertisers don’t care what I talk about, so long as the factory girls are listening, and they are listening.”

  She patted his hands. “Now, I want you to go and find me a Webbly to interview tonight, someone who can tell me how it’s all going. Any more protests?”

  He shook his head. “Not the noisy kind. Too many arrests.” There were over a hundred Webblies in jail, all over South China. “But you heard about Dongguan?”

  She shook her head.

  “The Webblies there have a new kind of demonstration. Instead of making a lot of noise and shouting slogans, they all walk very slowly around the bus-station, right in the middle of town, eating ice cream.”

  “Ice-cream?”

  He grinned. “Ice-cream. After the jingcha started to arrest anyone who even looked like he was going to protest, they started posting these very public notices: ‘Show up at such-and-such a place and buy an ice-cream.’ Dozens, then hundreds of them, eating ice-cream, grinning like maniacs, and the police were there, staring at each other like mannequins, like, Are we going to arrest these boys for eating ice-cream? And then someone got the bright idea of buying two ice-creams and giving one away to someone randomly passing by. It’s the easiest recruitment tool you can imagine!”

  She laughed so long and hard that tears ran down her face. “I love you guys,” she said. “I can’t wait to talk about this on tonight’s show.”

  “If they get arrested for eating ice-cream, they’re going to switch to getting together and smiling at each other. Can you imagine? Are we going to arrest these boys for smiling?”

  Her laughter broke through the invisible wall that separated them from the lounging, off-shift Webblies, who demanded to know what was so funny. Not all of them knew about the ice-cream—they were too busy patrolling the worlds, keeping the gold-farms from being run with replacement workers—but everyone agreed that it was pure genius.

  Soon they were downloading videos of the ice-cream eating, and then another shift of boys trickled in and wanted to be let in on the joke, and before they knew it, they were planning their own ice-cream eating festival, and the general hilarity continued until Jie and Lu slipped away to ’cast her show for the night, grabbing a couple of hysterical Webblies to interview in between the calls from the factory girls.

  As Lu put his head down on his pillow and draped his arm around Jie’s narrow shoulders and put his face in her thick, fragrant hair, he had a moment’s peace and joy, real joy, knowing that they couldn’t possibly lose.

  The strike was entering its second week when the empire struck back. Connor had known about the strike for days, but he hadn’t taken action right away. At first he wasn’t sure he wanted to take action. The parasites were keeping each other busy, after all, and the strikers were doing a better job of shutting down the gol
d markets than he ever had (much as it hurt to admit it). Plus there was something fascinating about the organization of these characters—they all came in through proxies, but by watching their sleep schedules and sniffing their chatter he knew that they were scattered all across the Pacific Rim and the subcontinent. Sitting there in his god’s eye, in Command Central, he felt like he had a front-row seat to an amazing and savage flea circus in which exotic, armored insects fought each other endlessly, moving in precise regimented lines that spoke of military discipline.

  But he couldn’t leave them to do this forever. He wasn’t the only one in Command Central who’d noticed that this was going on, and the derivative markets were starting to pick up on the news, yo-yoing so crazily that even the mainstream press had begun to sniff around. Game gold markets had been an exotic, silly-season news story a couple years back but these days the only people who paid attention to them were players: high-volume traders controlling huge fortunes that bought and sold game gold and its many sub-species in a too-fast-to-follow blur. Until, of course, word started to leak out about these Webblies and their pitched battles, their ice-cream socials, their global span—and now corporate PR was calling Command Central five times a day, trying to get a meeting so they could agree on what to tell the press.

  So first thing on Monday morning, he gathered all of Command Central, along with some of the cooler—that is, less neurotically paranoid—lawyers and a couple of the senior PR people in one of Coke’s secure boardrooms for a long session with the whiteboard.

  “We should just exterminate these parasites,” Bill said. “You can have the ten grand.” Connor and Bill’s bet had become a running joke in Command Central, but Connor and Bill knew that it was deadly serious. They were both part of the financial markets, and they knew that a bet was just another kind of financial transaction, and had to be honored.

  Connor’s smile was grim. He hadn’t known whether the security chief would come over to his side; he was such a pragmatist about these things. Maybe they’d get something done after all. “You know I’m with you, but the question is, how high a price are we prepared to pay to get rid of these people?”

  “No price is too high,” said Kaden, who prided himself on being the most macho guy in Command Central—the kind of guy who won’t shut up about his gun collection and his karate prowess. Kaden might have been a black belt twenty years ago, but five years in Command Central had made him lavishly, necklessly fat, unable to go up a flight of stairs without losing his breath.

  Bill—no lightweight himself—craned his head around to stare fishily at Kaden. He made a dismissive grunt and said, “Oh, really?”

  Kaden—called out in front of a room full of people—colored, dug in. “Goddamned right. These crooks are in our worlds. We can outspend and outmaneuver them. We just have to have the balls to do what it takes, instead of pussying out the way we always do.”

  Bill grunted again, a sound like a cement-mixer with indigestion. “No price is too high?”

  “Nope.”

  “How about shutting down the game? Is that price too high?”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “I don’t think I’m the one being stupid. There’s an upper limit on how much this company can afford to spend on these jerks. If removing them from the game costs us more than leaving them there, we’re just shooting ourselves in the head. So let’s stop talking about ‘pussying out’ and ‘no cost is too high’ and set some parameters that we can turn into action, all right?”

  “I just mean to say—”

  Bill got out of his seat and turned all the way around to face Kaden, fixing him with a withering stare. “Go,” he said. “Just go. You’re a pretty good level designer, but I’ve seen better. And as a person, you’re a total waste. You’ve got nothing useful to add to this discussion except for stupid slogans. We’ve heard the stupid slogans. Go buff your paladin or something and let the grownups get on with it.”

  Silence descended on the meeting room. Connor, standing at the front of the room, thought about telling Bill to back off, but the thing was, he was right, Kaden was a total ass, and letting him talk would just distract them all from getting the job done.

  Kaden sat, mouth open and fishlike, for a moment, then looked around for support. He found none. Bill made a condescending little shooing gesture. Kaden’s face went from red to purple.

  “Just go,” Connor said, and that broke the moment. Kaden slunk out of the room like a whipped dog and they all turned back to Connor.

  “Okay,” Connor said. “Here’s the thing: this has to be about solving the problem, not posturing or thumping our chests. So let’s stick to the problem.” He nodded at Bill.

  Bill stood, turned around to face the audience. “Here’s what doesn’t work: IP addresses. They’re coming in from proxies all over the US, and they can find proxies faster than we can blacklist them. Plus we’ve got tons of legit customers—expats, mostly—who live in China and around Asia and use these proxies to escape their local network blocks. But even if we were willing to throw those customers under a bus to stop the gold farmers, we couldn’t.

  “Also doesn’t work: payment tracing. These accounts are bought on legit prepaid cards. The farmers are all paying customers, in other words. We could shut off the prepaid cards and insist on credit cards, but they’d just get prepaid credit cards. And every kid in America and Canada and Europe who pays for his or her account with prepaid cards from the corner store would be out of luck. That’s a lot of customers to throw under the bus—and they’ll just move on to one of our competitors. Plus, those prepaid cards are gold. Kids buy them and half the time they don’t use them—they’re free money for us.

  “Finally doesn’t work: Behavioral profiling. Yes, these characters have some stereotypical behaviors, like running the same grinding tasks for hours, or engaging in these giant, epic battles. But this is also characteristic of a huge number of normal players—again, these are people we don’t want to throw under the bus.

  “So what will work?”

  Connor nodded. “One thing I know we can do is get more mileage out of the busts we make. Once we positively identify a farmer, we should be able to take out his whole network by backtracking the people he’s chatted with, the ones he’s partied with, his guildies.”

  Bill was shaking his head and made a rumbling sound. “That’s the sound of your bus running over more legit players. These cats can easily blow that strategy just by recruiting normal players for their raids and fights. Hell, we designed it that way.”

  “The money’ll be easier to trace,” said Fairfax, interrupting them. She looked from one to the other. “I mean, these farmer types have to dispose of their gold, and if we take it back from any player that bought it—”

  “They’d go crazy,” Connor said.

  “It’s against the terms of service,” she said. “They know they’re cheating. It’d be justice. On what basis could they complain? They agree to the terms every time they log on.”

  Connor sighed. The terms of service were eighteen screens long and required a law degree to understand. They prohibited every conceivable in-game activity, up to and including having fun. Technically, every player violated the terms every day, which meant that if they wanted to, they could kick off anyone at any time (of course, this too was allowed in the terms: “Coca-Cola Games, Ltd., reserves the right to terminate your account at any time, for any reason”). “The problem is that too many players think that buying gold is all right. We sell gold, after all, on our own exchanges, all the time. If you nuked every account involved in a gold-farming buy, we’d depopulate the world by something like eighty percent. We can’t afford it.”

  “Eighty percent? No way—”

  “Look,” he said. “I’ve been going after the farmers now for months. It’s the first time we’ve ever tried to be systematic about them, instead of just slapping them down when the activity gets a little too intense. I can show you the numbers if you want, show yo
u how I worked this out, but for now, let’s just say that I’m the expert on this subject and I’m not making this up.”

  Fairfax looked chastened. “Fine,” she said. “So you want to go after the known associates of the farmers we bust, even though we can all see how easy that will be for them to defeat.”

  Connor shrugged. “Okay, sure. They’ll get around it, eventually. But we’ll have some time to get on them.”

  Bill cleared his throat, shook his head again. “You have any idea how much transactional data we’re going to have to store to keep a record of every person every player has ever talked to or fought with? And then someone will have to go over all those transactions, one by one, every time we bust a player, to make sure we’re getting real confederates and not innocent bystanders. Where are all those people going to come from?”

  Someone in the audience—it was Baird, the lawyer Connor hated the least—said, “What about the Mechanical Turks?”

  Connor and Bill stared at each other, mouths open. The lawyer looked slightly nervous. “I mean—”

  “Of course,” Connor said. “And we could do it for free. Just let the Turks keep any gold from the accounts of busted players.”

  One of the other economists was young Palmer, and he reminded Connor of himself a few years back. Connor hated him. His eager hand shot up. “I thought the point was to keep all that gold out of the market,” he said. “How can we control the monetary supply if these goombas are allowed to flood the market with cheap money?”

  Connor waved his hands. “Yes, theoretically these cats are outside our monetary planning, but even going flat out, they just don’t move the market that much. And if they do, we can restrict the supply at our side, or adjust the basic in-game costs up or down…And it’s not as if the Turks will turn around and spend the gold right away, or dump it through one of the official exchanges, especially if we keep the exchange rate low through that period.”