Read this all in one go before work one morning last month and really, really liked it. If it had just been a story about a girl and her second gaming life I would have liked it anyway, but it also had some really unexpected stuff about economics and labor, which is not something you exepct to find in a book whose artwork makes you want to hug a pillow because it’s so adorable. You know pretty quickly, though. The book opens with an essay by the author explaining his motivations in writing it, and right away he starts throwing around big scary phrases that I haven’t heard since graduate school.
And I liked it.
I’ve heard before that Doctorow tends to get a bit didactic in his writing, but I thought this had a nice balance of character story and real life . . . stuff. The main character is Anda, a shy high school girl who has just moved with her family to Flagstaff. She jumps on the chance to join a guild in the online game Coarsegold Online. But her fun gaming turns into something different when she and a fellow guild-member start taking paying gigs to kill illegal gold farmers, who spend their whole gaming lives farming gold for other people to buy. This is the first indication of real world economics making its presence known in the fictional space of the game.
Anda feels righteous about stopping the gold farmers from breaking the rules of the game until she meets an actual gold farmer and realizes the true nature of the situation. Things escalate from there.
I’d never read anything by Cory Doctorow before but I liked this enough that I’m looking forward to checking out his other stuff in the future. Jen Wang’s artwork was positively delicious as well. I wanted to jump into the panels and swim in all the colors. In fact, I kind of wanted to start the whole thing over again as soon as I finished it.
[4.5 stars]
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