For the Win, Cory Doctorow [english novels for students .TXT] 📗

worldless cry, using the movement as inertia for a wild roundhouse kick that connected with one of the Pinkertons, a man with sleepy eyes and a thick mustache. Justbob's foot caught him in the side, and they all heard the sound of his ribs breaking under the toe of her demure sandal with its fake jewels. The sandal flew on and clattered to the road with the cheap sound of paste gems.

The men hadn't expected that, and there was a moment when they stopped in their tracks, staring at their fallen comrade, and in that instant, Big Sister Nor thought that -- just maybe -- they could get away. But Justbob's chest was heaving, her face contorted in rage, and she leapt at the next man, a fat man in a sweaty sportcoat, thumbs aiming at his eyes, and as she reached him, the man beside him lifted his truncheon and brought it down, glancing off her high, fine cheekbone and then smashing against her collarbone.

Justbob howled like a wounded dog and fell back, landing a hard punch in her attacker's groin as she fell back.

But now the Pinkertons were on them, and their arms were raised, their truncheons held high, and as the first one swung into Big Sister Nor's left breast, she cried out and her mind was filled with Affendi and her broken fingers, her unrecognizably bruised face. Somewhere, just a few tantalizing meters up the Lorang, night people were eating a huge feast of fish and goat in curry, the smells in the air. But that was there. Here, Big Siter Nor was infinitely far from them, and the truncheons rose and fell and she curled up to protect her head, her breasts, her stomach, and in so doing exposed her tender kidneys, her delicate short-ribs, and there she lay, enduring a season in hell that went on for an eternity and a half.

This

scene is dedicated to Chapters/Indigo, the national Canadian

megachain. I was working at Bakka, the independent science fiction

bookstore, when Chapters opened its first store in Toronto and I knew

that something big was going on right away, because two of our

smartest, best-informed customers stopped in to tell me that they'd

been hired to run the science fiction section. From the start,

Chapters raised the bar on what a big corporate bookstore could be,

extending its hours, adding a friendly cafe and lots of seating,

installing in-store self-service terminals and stocking the most

amazing variety of titles.

Chapters/Indigo

Connor Prikkel sometimes thought of math as a beautiful girl, the kind of girl that he'd dreamt of wooing, dating, even marrying, while sitting in the back of any class that wasn't related to math, daydreaming. A beautiful girl like Jenny Rosen, who'd had classes with him all through high-school, who always seemed to know the answer no matter what the subject, who had a light dusting of freckles around her nose and a quirky half-smile. Who dressed in jeans that she'd tailored herself, in t-shirts she'd modded, stitching multiple shirts together to make tight little half-shirts, elaborate shawls, mock turtelnecks.

Jenny Rosen had seemed to have it all: beauty and brains and, above all, rationality: she didn't like the way that store-bought jeans fit, so she hacked her own. She didn't like the t-shirts that everyone wore, so she changed the shirts to suit her taste. She was funny, she was clever, and he'd been completely, head-over-heels in love with her from sophomore English right through to senior American History.

They'd been friendly through that time, though not really friends. Connor���s friends were into gaming and computers, Jenny's friends were jocks and school-paper kids. But friendly, sure, enough to say hello in the hallway, enough to become lab partners in sophomore physics (she was a careful taker of notes, and her hair-stuff smelled amazing, and their hands brushed against each other a hundred times that semester).

And then, in senior year, he'd asked her out to a movie. Then she'd asked him to a track rally. Then he'd asked her to work with him on an American History project on Chinese railway workers that involved going to Chinatown after school, and there they'd had a giant dim sum meal and then sat in a park and talked for hours, and then they'd stopped talking and started kissing.

And one thing led to another, and the kissing led to more kissing, and then their friends all started to whisper, "Did you hear about Connor and Jenny?" and she met his parents and he met hers. And it had all seemed perfect.

But it wasn't perfect. Anything but.

In the four months, two weeks and three days that they were officially a couple, they had approximately 2,453,212 arguments, each more blazing than the last. Theoretically, he understood everything he needed to about her. She loved sports. She loved to use her mind. She loved humor. She loved silly comedies and slow music without words.

And so he would go away and plan out exactly how to deliver all these things to her, plugging in her loves like variables into an equation, working out elaborate schemes to deliver them to her.

But it never worked. He'd work it out so that they could go to a ball game at AT&T Park and she'd want to go see a concert at Cow Palace instead. He'd take her to see a new wacky comedy and she'd want to go home and work on an overdue assignment. No matter how hard he tried to get her reality and his theory to match up, he always failed.

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 Masters in Signal Processing at Caltech, and the first year of a PhD 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 PhD 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

equalled

fun

.

That was the equation that had come to him one day early in his second semester of the PhD 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 a sick-call 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 onto something.

He called them the Prikkel equations, and they described in elegant, pure, abstract math the relationship between all the variables that went into fun, and how fun equalled 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 "PhD" 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 gold 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