麻豆传媒

Disobedient computers, frightened gold farmers and money gone seriously ethereal. Jessica Griggs takes a trip to the complex frontier world of technology activist Cory Doctorow as his novel For the Win hits the shelves

Many people will have never heard about the 鈥�gold farming鈥� of your novel. What is it?

Gold farming describes a real-world activity: it鈥檚 all the things people, mostly in poor countries, do to amass things of worth in the online gaming world. These range from amassing gold to collecting rare, expensive items like weapons or ingredients for a magic spell or stuff that a player can use to get up to the next level in the game. These things are sold to rich players who don鈥檛 want to have to do the work themselves. Gold farmers are seen as akin to hackers.

When did gold farming start?

First reports were in Central America and Mexico in about 2003. Most of the trade has now moved to China, or at least into the Chinese language. In China, the get-rich-quick story runs like this: find 10 boys who just want to play video games around the clock, stick them in a room with 10 computers and then watch the money roll in.

How is the 鈥済old鈥� in the gamers鈥� world exchanged for hard cash?

One player will meet another and do the exchange, or drop gold at a preassigned location on a server where another player will pick it up. The money exits the game and enters the real world via brokers. One reason for this is linguistic. If you are a kid from Sichuan province who only speaks five words of English it鈥檚 going to be hard to sell gold to a kid from Los Angeles.

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鈥檛 believe they鈥檙e 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鈥檚 top economies are virtual economies. Scarily, in 2001 the game EverQuest was ranked 77 in the world 鈥� on par with Russia as it was then.

So our financial world is like a game in that it鈥檚 become ever more ethereal?

We exist in a world in which large parts of our economy already take place in this imaginary realm. The participants are not just the bond traders, they鈥檙e also the formal exchequers. So all the real-life fiscal games get played out here. Like governments, the game companies can print more money, devalue their currency, be inflationary or deflationary. While these guys think they have total control, down there at the scurrying-in-the-baseboard level are mice nibbling at the wires of their mansions.

Your book seems like a parable about financial bubbles 鈥� like the one we just went through.

Absolutely. One of the interesting things about that bubble was that there weren鈥檛 enough debt instruments 鈥� for example, bonds or mortgages 鈥� being created through people actually borrowing money, so the folk in the finance houses made synthetic debt instruments that were bets on other debt instruments.

What鈥檚 your gaming history?

Like anyone born in 1971, I grew up with video games and we had ColecoVision, an Atari and an Apple II Plus. But I wouldn鈥檛 call myself a hard-core gamer. My wife, on the other hand, was on the first UK Quake team. She鈥檚 my source for games now. On a typical evening in our house she鈥檒l kill zombies while shouting into her headset while I blog for two hours and ask her questions about what鈥檚 going on.

When you鈥檙e not blogging you鈥檙e busy being a 鈥渢echnology activist鈥�. What does that involve?

A technology activist believes that the underlying architecture of our technology influences, and to a certain extent determines, the politics we practice. So, for example, one of the areas where I鈥檓 very worried is in the field of digital rights management.

What does that mean?

Digital rights management, or DRM, is based on the idea that we should design computers that consult an internal policy document written by a third party to check if anything the owner might want to do is a permitted task. If you hit control S or control C to save the work or copy the work, your computer would be able to stop you. I think your computer should never say no, it should always obey you.

鈥淚 think your computer should never say no, it should always obey you鈥�

The DRM files can be on your computer without your knowledge and may hide from you by not showing up in a list of the programs you are running. This is fundamentally broken: it reminds me of my least favourite cinematic science fiction motifs, the self-destructing spaceship where somebody accidentally presses a button and the spaceship starts counting down to oblivion and there鈥檚 absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.

You鈥檝e released your books under Creative Commons Licences. What does that mean for us readers?

You can do anything you want with a book of mine: such as videos, music or other fiction, or you can bind it and print it, but you can鈥檛 charge money for that and you have to let other people do to your work what you鈥檝e done to mine, so you have to licence your work under the same terms.

Have people played with your work that way?

Just this morning a kid sent me his own chapter of my previous book, Little Brother, that he鈥檇 written. And there鈥檚 a guy in Australia who鈥檚 got a band that has done an entire CD of songs based on my work.

That鈥檚 flattering, but how do you benefit?

It鈥檚 financially sensible in that all of this stuff just amounts to publicity, and the more publicity there is the greater the likelihood that the book while rise to the attention of a potential customer. Obscurity, not piracy, is the biggest problem writers face. In the 21st century, if you are not making art with the intention of it being copied, you are not making contemporary art. From here on, hard drives get smaller and cheaper, networks get easier to use and more and more people know how to use them so copying will just get easier.

Are there moral reasons?

Yes. It is hypocritical to say 鈥渄on鈥檛 copy鈥� when everybody I know is a copyist. I鈥檓 certainly on the wrong side of copyright law at least once a day for things like pasting articles into emails. I鈥檝e been an avid copyist all my life, if it wasn鈥檛 for mix tapes, my entire adolescence would have been celibate! I can鈥檛 do my job unless I have the source material around so I scan records and photocopy library books I can鈥檛 take out. It鈥檚 how we all learn to do stuff. That鈥檚 how we are, we are descendents of molecules formed a million years ago because they figured out how to replicate themselves. We have a name for things that don鈥檛 copy themselves: dead.