9 Strand A Reading: Anda’s Game, Graphic Novel adapted by Dara Naraghi (adapted
9 Strand A Reading: Anda’s Game, Graphic Novel adapted by Dara Naraghi (adapted from a story by Corey Doctorow)
by Corey Doctorow
About This Reading
For readers who haven’t participated in online gaming communities like Worlds of Warcraft (WoW), Anda’s Game may seem like a work of science fiction. Yet the events depicted in it are realistic. In this story, Doctorow explores a practice known as “gold farming”: the hiring of often under-aged people to play the game in order to produce items used for in-game currency. This practice often happened in developing countries in factory conditions. The supplemental reading “Understanding ‘Gold Farming'” provides one perspective of the financial impact of the practice.
Introduction to Anda’s Game
The easiest way to write futuristic (or futurismic) science fiction is to predict, with rigor and absolute accuracy, the present day.
Anda’s Game is a sterling example of this approach. I ripped a story from the headlines—reports on blogs about a stunning presentation at a video-games conference about “gold farmers” in latinamerica who were being paid a pittance “grind” (undertake boring, repetitive wealth-creating tasks in a game) with the product of their labor sold on to rich northern gamers who wanted to level-up without all the hard work.
The practice of gold farming became more and more mainstream, growing with the online role-playing game industry and spreading around the world (legend has it that the Chinese rice harvest was endangered because so many real farmers had quit the field to pursue a more lucrative harvest in virtual online gold). Every time one of these stories broke, I was lionized for my spectacular prescience in so accurately predicting the gold-farming phenomenon—I had successfully predicted the present.
Anda’s Game tries to square up the age-old fight for rights for oppressed minorities in the rich world with the fight for the rights of the squalid, miserable majority in the developing world. This tension arises again and again, and it affords a juicy opportunity to play different underclasses off against one another. Think of how handily Detroit’s auto-workers were distracted from GM’s greed when they were given Mexican free-trade-zone labor to treat as a scapegoat; the American worker’s enemy isn’t the Mexican worker, it’s the auto manufacturer who screws both of them. They fought NAFTA instead of GM, and GM won
This was the first of several stories I’ve written with titles from famous sf stories and novels (Anda’s Game sounds a lot like “Ender’s Game” when pronounced in a British accent). I came to this curious practice as a response to Ray Bradbury describing Michael Moore as a crook for repurposing the title “Fahrenheit 451” as “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Bradbury doesn’t like Moore’s politics, and didn’t want his seminal work on free speech being used to promote opposing political ideology.
Well, this is just too much irony to bear. Titles have no copyright, and science fiction is a field tha