For the Win, Cory Doctorow [free reads .TXT] 📗

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 random 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 gold 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-yo-ing 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 board-rooms for a long session with the white-board.
"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 20 years ago, but five years in Command Central had made him lavishly, necklessly fat, and 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 outmanoeuvre 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.
"OK," 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 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 18 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 80 percent. We can't afford it."
"80 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 you 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 it will be to defeat."
Connor shrugged. "OK, 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