The horrifying tale of a blockchain-based virtual sweatshop

”Anda’s Game” was a warning, not a suggestion.

In 2004, my wife came home from the Game Developers Conference with a wild story. A presenter there claimed that he had set up a sweatshop on the US/Mexican border where he paid low-wage workers to do repetitive tasks in Everquest to amass virtual gold, which was sold on Ebay to lazier, richer players

The presenter was a well-known bullshitter and people were skeptical at the time, but my imagination was fired. I sat down at my keyboard and wrote “Anda’s Game,” a story about “gold farmers” who form an in-game, transnational trade-union under their bosses’ noses:

https://www.salon.com/2004/11/15/andas_game/

“Anda’s Game” was a surprise hit. It got reprinted in the year’s Best American Short Stories, won a bunch of awards, and Jen Wang and Firstsecond turned it into the NYT bestselling graphic novel “In Real Life”:

https://firstsecondbooks.com/books/new-book-in-real-life-by-cory-doctorow-and-jen-wang/

Then, in 2010, I adapted the story into For the Win, a YA novel about gold farming and global trade unions (led by the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, AKA IWWW, AKA Webblies):