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Would you like For the Win by Cory Doctorow?

"Would I like For the Win by Cory Doctorow?", said no-one to me, ever. Book reviews are useful as such, but the most useful thing is for someone to give me enough information about the sort of book that a book is that I'd know if I'd like it. It may be lacking in depth of character, but if it's got spaceships in it, or mind-expanding travelogue (I'm looking at you Iain M Banks) then that's enough for me.

So would you like it? I think you'd need to know a bit about gold farming, or at least read up on it before you start. I think you'd need an interest in video games, but not necessarily. You would have to enjoy, or not mind, explanations of economics as applied to the virtual world. They are sprinkled throughout but avoid being not too patronising.

What I'd like to know about it is how much is made up, without having to do the tedious work of typing stuff into search engines to see, for example, if there really is an MMO called Mushroom Kingdom run by Nintendo. If you know someone who's done that heavy lifting already then let me know. I did do a bit of looking at real MMOs and tweeted this:

If you want a proper review then here's one I approve of from the Book Smugglers.

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