For the Win

by Cory Doctorow

“How long ago?”

  “Two months ago,” he said, sheepishly. “It’s paying a monthly coupon of sixteen percent on average. I’ve started to move my long-term savings into it too.”

  “Two months? How many of your other clients have you brought in on this deal?” He felt a curious mixture of anger and elation—how dare Ira keep this to himself, and how fine that he was about to share it!

  “None!” Ira was speaking quickly now. “Look, Connor, all my cards on the table now. You’re the best customer I got. Without you, hell, my take-home pay’d probably be cut in half. The only reason I haven’t brought this to you before now is, you know, there wasn’t any more to go around! Any time there was an offer on these things, they’d be snapped up in a second.”

  “So what happened? Did all your greedy pals get their fill?”

  Ira laughed. “Not hardly! But you know how it goes, as soon as something takes off like these vouchers, there’s a lot of people trying to figure out how to make more of them. Turns out there’s a bank, one of these offshore ones that’s some Dubai prince’s private fortune, and the prince is a doubter. The bank’s selling very long bets against these bonds on great terms. They’re one-year coupons and they pay off big if the bonds don’t crash. So now there’s some uncertainty in the pool and some people are flipping, betting that the Prince knows something they don’t, buying his paper and selling their bonds. We’ve gone one better: we’ve got a floating pool of hedged-off packages that balance out the Prince’s bets and these bonds, so no matter what happens, you’re in the green. We buy or sell every day based on the rates on each. It’s—”

  “Risk free?”

  “Virtually risk free. Absolutely.”

  Connor’s mouth was dry. There was something going on here, something big. His mind was at war with itself. Finance was a game, the biggest game, and the rules were set by the players, not by a designer. Sometimes the rules went crazy and you got a little pocket of insanity, where a small bet could give you unimaginable wins. He knew how this worked. Of course he did. Hadn’t he been chasing gold farmers up and down the worlds, trying to find their own little high-return pockets and turn them inside out? At the same time, there was just no such thing as a free lunch. Something that looked too good to be true probably was too good to be true. He’d grown up on that and all the other commonsense sayings his parents had gifted him with, them with their small-town house and no mortgage and their sensible retirement funds that would have them clipping coupons and going to two-for-one sales for the rest of their lives.

  “Twenty grand,” he blurted. It was a lot, but he could handle it. He’d made more than that on his investments in the past 90 days. He could make it up in the next 90 days if—

  “Twenty? Are you kidding? Connor, look, this is the kind of thing comes along once in a lifetime! I came to you first, buddy, so you could get in big. Shit, buddy, I’ll sell you twenty grand’s worth of these things, but I tell you what—”

  It made him feel small, even though he knew it was supposed to make him feel small. It was like there were two Connors, a cool, rational one and an emotional one, bitterly fighting over control of his body. Rational won, though it was a hard-fought thing.

  “Twenty’s all I’ve got in cash right now,” he lied, emotional Connor winning this small concession. “If I could afford more—”

  “Oh!” Ira said, and Connor could hear the toothy smile in his voice. “Connor, pal, I don’t do this very often, and I’d appreciate it if you’d keep this to yourself, but how about if I promise you that your normal trades for today will pick up an extra, uh, make it twenty more, for a total of forty thousand. Would you want to plow that profit into these puppies?”

  Connor’s mouth went dry. He knew how this worked, but he’d long ago given up on being a part of it. It was the oldest broker-scam in the world: every day, brokers made a number of “off-book” trades, buying stocks and bonds and derivatives on the hunch that they’d go up. Being “off-book” meant that these trades weren’t assigned to any particular client’s account; the money to buy them came out of the general account for the brokerage house.

  At the end of the day, some—maybe all—of those trades would have come out ahead. Some—maybe all—would have come out behind. And that’s when the magic began. By back-dating the books, the broker could assign the shitty trades to shitty customers, cheapskates, or big, locked-in, slow-moving customers, like loosely-managed estates for long-dead people whose wealth was held in trust. The gains could be written to the broker’s best customers, like some billionaire that the broker was hoping to do more business with. In this way, every broker got a certain amount of discretion every day in choosing who would make money and who would lose it. It was just a larger version of the barista at the coffee shop slipping her regulars a large instead of a medium every now and again, without charging for the upgrade. The partners who ran the brokerages knew that this was going on, and so did many of the customers. It was impossible to prove that you’d lost money or gained money this way—unless your broker told you at 9:15 on a Tuesday morning that your account would have an extra $20,000 in it by 5PM.

  Ira had just taken a big risk in telling Connor what he was going to do for him. Now that he had this admission, he could, theoretically, have Ira arrested for securities fraud. That is, until and unless he gave Ira the go-ahead, at which point they’d both be guilty, in on it together.

  And there rational and emotional Connor wrestled, on the knife-edge between wealth and conspiracy and pointless, gainless honesty. They tumbled onto the conspiracy side. After all, Connor and the broker bent the rules every time Connor ordered a trade on one of Coca-Cola Games’s futures. This was just the same thing, only more so.

  “Do it,” he said. “Thanks, Ira.”

  Ira’s breath whooshed out over the phone, and Connor realized that the broker had been holding his breath and waiting on his reply, waiting to find out if he’d gone too far. The salesman really wanted to sell him this package.

  Later, in Command Central, Connor watched his feeds and thought about it, and something felt…hinky. Why had Ira been so eager? Because Connor was such a great customer and Ira thought if he made Connor a ton of money, Connor would give it back to him to continue investing, making more and more money for him, and more and more commissions for the broker?

  And now that his antennae were up, he started to see all kinds of ghosts in his feeds, little hints of gold and elite items changing hands in funny ways, valued too high or not high enough, all out of whack with the actual value in-game. Of course, who knew what the in-game value of anything could really be? Say the gamerunners decided to make the Zombie Mecha gatling guns fire depleted uranium ammo, starting six months from now. The easy calculation had gatling guns shooting up in value in six months, because it would make it possible for the Mecha to wade through giant hordes of zombies without being overpowered. But what if that made the game too easy, and lots of players left? Once your buddies went over to Anthills and Hives and started team-playing huge, warring hive-intelligences, would you want to hang around Zombie Mecha, alone and forlorn, firing your gatling gun at the zombies? Would the zombies stop being fun objectives and start being mere collections of growling pixels?

  It took the subtle fingerspitzengefühl of a fortuneteller to really predict what would happen to the game when you nerfed or buffed one character class or weapon or monster. Every change like this was watched closely by gamerunners for weeks, around the clock, and they’d tweak the characteristics of the change from minute to minute, trying to get the game into balance.

  The feeds told the story. Out there in gameland, there was a hell of a lot of activity, trades back and forth, and it worried him. He started to ask the other gamerunners if they noticed anything out of the ordinary but then something else leapt out of his feeds: there! Gold farmers!

  He’d been looking for them everywhere, and finding them. Gold farming had a number of signatures that you could spot with the right
feed. Any time someone logged in from a mysterious Asian IP address, walked to the nearest trading post, stripped off every scrap of armor and bling and sold it, then took all the resulting cash and the entire contents of her guild bank and turned it over to some level-one noob on a free trial account that had only started an hour before, who, in turn, turned the money over to a series of several hundred more noobs who quickly scattered and deposited it in their own guild banks, well, that was a sure bet you’d found some gold farmer who was hacking accounts. Hell, half the time you could tell who the farmers were just by looking at the names they gave their guilds: real players either went for the heroic (“Savage Thunder”) or the ironic (“The Nerf Herders”) or the eponymous (“Jim’s Raiders”) but they rarely went by “asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdf2329” or, God help him, “707A55DF0D7E15BBB9FB3BE16562F22C026A882E40164C7B149B15DE7137ED1A.”

  But as soon as he tweaked his feeds to catch them, the farmers figured out how to dodge them. The guilds got good names, the hacked players started behaving more plausibly—having half-assed dialogue with the toons they were buffing with all their goods—and the gangs that converged on any accidental motherlode in the game did a lot of realistic milling about and chatting in broken English. Increasingly, the players were logging in with prepaid cards diverted from the US over American proxies, making them indistinguishable from the lucrative American kid trade, who were apt to start playing by buying some prepaid cards along with their Cokes and gum at the convenience store. Those kids had the attention spans of gnats, and if you knocked them offline after mistaking them for a gold farmer, they left and went straight to a competing world and never again showed up in your game or on your balance sheet.

  It was amazing how fast information spread among these creeps. Well, not amazing. After all, information spread among normal players faster than you’d believe too—it was great, you hardly had to lift a finger or spend a penny on marketing when you released some new elite items or unveiled a new world. They players would talk it up for you, spreading the word at the speed of gossip. And the same jungle telegraph ran through the farmers’ underground, he could see it at work.

  And there were more of them, a little guild of twenty, all grinding and grinding the same campaign. They were fresh characters, created two days before, and they’d been created by players who knew what they were doing—it was just the perfect balance between rezzers and tanks and casters, a good mix of area of effect and melee weapons. They’d leveled damned fast—he pulled up some forensics on some of the toons, felt his fingerspitzengefühl tingle as the game guttered like a flame in a breeze. He’d installed the forensics packages over the howls of protest from the admin team who’d shown him chart after chart about what running the kind of history he wanted to see would do to server performance. He’d gotten his forensics, but only after promising to use them sparingly.

  And there it was: the players had leveled each other by going into a PvP—Player versus Player—tournament area and repeatedly killing one another. As soon as one of them dinged up a level, he would stand undefended and let the other player kill him quickly. The game gave megapoints for killing a higher level player. Once player two dinged, they switched places, and laddered, one after the other, up to heights that normal players would take forever to attain.

  The campaign they were running was simple: scrounging a mix of earth-fairy wings and certain mushroom caps, giving them over to a potion-master who would pay them in gold. It wasn’t anything special and it was a little below their levels, but when he charted out the returns in gold and experience per hour, he saw that someone had carelessly created a mission that would pay out nearly triple what the regular campaign was supposed to deliver. He shook his head. How the hell did they figure this stuff out? You’d need to chart every single little finicky mission in the game and there were tens of thousands of missions, created by designers who used software algorithms to spin a basic scenario into hundreds of variants.

  And there they were, happily collecting their mushroom caps and killing the brown fairies and plucking their wings. Every now and again they’d happen on a bigger monster that wandered into their aggro zone and they’d dispatch it with cool ease.

  His finger trembled over the macro that would suspend their accounts and boot them off the server. It didn’t move.

  He admired them, that was the problem. They were doing something efficiently, quietly and well, with a minimum of fuss. They understood the game nearly as well as he did, without the benefit of Command Central and its many feeds. He—

  He logged in.

  He picked an av he’d buffed up to level 43, halfway up the ladder to the maximum, which was 90. Regulus was an elf healer, tall and whip-thin, with a huge rucksack bulging with herbs and potions. He was a nominal member of one of the mid-sized player guilds, one of the ones that would accept even any player for a small fee, which offered training courses, guild-banking, scheduled events, all with the glad sanction from Coca-Cola. The right sort of people.

  >Hello

  Two months before, the players would have kept on running their mission, blithely ignoring him. But that was one of the tell-tales his feeds looked for to pick out the farmers. Instead, these toons all waved at him and did little emotes, some of which were quite good custom jobs including dance-moves, elaborate mime and other gestures. If his feeds hadn’t picked these jokers out as farmers, he’d have pegged them as hardcore players. But they hadn’t actually spoken or chatted him anything. They were almost certainly Chinese and English would be hard for them.

  > Wanna group?

  He offered them a really plum quest, one that had a crazy-high gold and experience reward for a relatively nearby objective: retrieving Dvalinn’s Runes from a deep cave that they’d have to fight their way into, killing a bunch of gimpy dwarves and a couple of decent bosses on the way. The quest was chained to one that led to a fight with Fenrisulfr, one of the biggest bosses in Svartalfheim Warriors, a megaboss that you needed a huge party to take down, but which rewarded you with enormous treasure. The whole thing was farmer-bait he’d cooked up specifically for this kind of mission.

  After a decent interval—short, but long enough for the players to be puzzling through a machine-translation of the quest-text—they gladly joined, sending simple thanks over text.

  He pretended he saw nothing weird about their silence as they progressed toward the objective, but in the meantime, he concentrated on observing them closely, trying to picture them around a table in a smoky cafe in China or Vietnam or Cambodia or Malaysia, twenty skinny boys with oily hair and zits, cigarettes in the corners of their mouths, squinting around the curl of smoke. Maybe they were in more than one place, two or even three groups. They almost certainly had some kind of back-channel, be it voice, text, or simply shouting at each other over the table, because they moved with good coordination, but with enough individualism that it seemed unlikely that this was all one guy running twenty bots. They were a gang, and they thought they were doing nothing wrong, but they were cheaters, and they were helping cheaters. They filled the games with chat in a language the paying customers didn’t speak, they camped on the spawn-points for rares, making it impossible for real players to get them without buying them. They ruined the game for real players.

  > Where you from?

  He had to be aware that they were probably trying to figure out if he was from the game, and if he made things too easy for them, he might tip them off.

  One player, an ogre caster with a huge club and a bandolier of mystic skulls etched with runes, replied

  > We’re Chinese, hope that’s OK with you

  This was more frank than he’d expected. Other groups he’d approached with the same gimmick had been much more close-lipped, claiming to come from unlikely places in the midwest like Sioux Falls, places that seemed to have been chosen by randomly clicking on a map of the US.

  > China!

  he typed,

  > You seem pretty good with English then
!

  The ogre—Prince Simon, according to his stats—emoted a little bow.

  > I studied in school. My guildies aren’t same good.

  Connor thought about who he was pretending to be: a young player in a big American city like LA. What would he say to these people?

  > Is it late there?

  > Yes, after dinner. We always play after dinner.

  > Sounds like a lot of fun! I wish I had a big group of friends who were free after dinner. It’s always homework homework homework

  Connor’s fictional persona was sharpening up for him now, a lonely high-school kid in La Jolla or San Diego, somewhere on the ocean, somewhere white and middle class and isolated. Somewhere without sidewalks. The kind of kid who might come across a plum quest like Dvalinn’s Runes and have to go and round up a group of strangers to run it with him.

  > It’s a good time

  the ogre said. A pause.

  > My friend wants to know what you’re studying?

  His persona floated an answer into his head.

  > I’m about to graduate. I’ve applied for civil engineering at a couple of schools. Hope I get in!

  The ogre said,

  > I was a civil engineer before I left home. I designed bridges, five bridges. For a high-speed train system.

  Connor mentally revised his image of the boys into young men, adults.

  > When did you leave home?

  > 2 years. No more work. I will go home soon though I think. I have a family there. A little son, only 3

  The ogre messaged him an image. A grinning Chinese boy in a sailor suit, toothy, holding a drippy ice cream cone like a baton, waving it like a conductor.

  Connor’s fictional seventeen-year-old didn’t have any reaction to the picture, but his 36-year-old self did. A father leaving his son behind, plunging off to find work. Connor hadn’t ever had to support someone, but he’d thought about it a lot. In Connor’s world, where people’s motives were governed by envy and fear, the picture of this baby was seismic, an earthquake shaking things up and making the furnishings fall to the floor and shatter. He struggled to find his character.