Anda's Game by Cory Doctorow

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 that avidly repurposes titles — it seems like writing a story called "Nightfall" is practically a rite of passage for some writers. What's more, the idea that political speech (the comparison of the Bush regime to the totalitarian state of Fahrenheit 451) should be suppressed because the author disagrees is antithetical to the inspiring free speech message that shoots through Fahrenheit 451.
    So I decided to start writing stories with the same titles as famous sf, and to make each one a commentary, criticism, or parody of the cherished ideas of the field. Anda's Game was the first of these, but it's not the last — I, Robot appears elsewhere in this volume, and I'm almost finished a story called True Names that Ben Rosenbaum and I have been tossing back and forth for a while. After that, I think it'll be The Man Who Sold the Moon, and then maybe Jeffty is Five.
    I sold this story to Salon, and it was later reprinted in Michael Chabon's Best American Short Stories (a story written by a Canadian about Brits, no less!), and it was later podcasted by retired pro Quake player Alice Taylor for my podcast.

Anda's Game
    (Originally published on Salon, November 2004)
    Anda didn't really start to play the game until she got herself a girl-shaped avatar. She was 12, and up until then, she'd played a boy-elf, because her parents had sternly warned her that if you played a girl you were an instant perv-magnet. None of the girls at Ada Lovelace Comprehensive would have been caught dead playing a girl character. In fact, the only girls she'd ever seen in-game were being played by boys. You could tell, cos they were shaped like a boy's idea of what a girl looked like: hooge buzwabs and