CRRP Assignment

Alan Xie

15/7/13

Writing 39B

CRRP draft 1

I want to talk about the genre, genre features and genre convention of novel For The Win in this essay. But before we talking about that, I would like to do more analysis about genre itself with you. My first question is what is genre. According to our text book, “Genre is a way to sort different kinds of texts into manageable categories.” In the page 16 “Genre help us to see sets of relations, in that they help us define different and organize social situations so that we know how those situation work.” In summary, genre is what we put stories under to identify what they are about. It seems like genre just doing the work of classification of context. It does not seem like quite complicate notion. But why we still have a lot of debates about the genre and the classification of it? For example, if the idea of genre is simple and clear, why we hold a discussion section to argue about if YA is genre and etc. The truth is genre itself is slippery and dynamic. From my perspective, genre this notion is ambiguous. I can barely find a specific rule that we can apply to classify the genre of a story like what we did to classify the color of my professor’s shirt. Also, It’s not that urgent for us to identify the genre of the novel we are going to read. It does not affect the process of gaining knowledge and experience from books. In other word, we read books for learning and relaxing instead of finding the specific genre of the book. Pay too much attention to figure out the genre of a book is not that necessary to readers.

However, genre is still judged as the one of the basic property of novel(context). It’s kind of nature of a book. It’s like the race of people. Some people are black, some people are white, peoples are equal, like some books are fiction books and some books are science books. The differences among nature of those books do not disturb reader to read books. But it does affect writers. I mean before writers finish their books, they have to consider about the genre of their books. Why? Because they consider this genre problem as writers instead of readers. The genre of a book decides the audience of a book, the narrative style of a book and etc. It’s tremendously important to a book. Just like you are African American, black is your race and your race is important to you that you definitely do not want to get discrimination, same idea.

So let’s talk about the genre of For the win. In Wikipedia, For the win is concluding as the genre of Young Adult. Just like what we discussed in discussion. The reason why YA can be seemed as a genre is because there a group of context share a particular sameness that their writers judge young adult as their audience. From what we discussed before, genre is slippery and dynamic. It’s just a loss set that people used to group the context followed some sameness. There are a enough amount of books, films, and other context share the same factor that their audience are for young adult. So YA should and can be seemed as a genre.

Now, you may have a question why For the win is a YA fiction novel. The truth is first, Doctorow write this story for young adult. He pretended his audience will be young adult before he started. Actually, Doctorow is known as an YA story writer. Almost all of his writings are YA fiction like his first novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, his bestselling novel Little Brother. So we can suspect that For the Win should be a YA fiction novel even before we read it. Alright, let’s go deep about the YA fiction convention of FTW. FTW is mainly about how how several young adult earn money by playing online games and their struggle to unionize and get better pay. I have to mention that one of the characteristic of the YA is YA’s major character are normally young adult or the story is narrated from young adults’ side. FTW meet this requirement. Also, the whole story is about online multi- role playing games. Who loves this kind of games most? Undoubtedly, we all know is young adult. For myself, I am 20 years old and I play League of Legend( multi-role online game) everyday. So it’s not hard to find that FTW Is for young adult.

I remember when I first have a book, my mom told me the reason why we need read books, which is learn from it. Until now, I still hold the opinion whatever kinds of book you read, you have to learn something from it, even it’s a fiction book. Actually, I think one of the reasons that we can distinguish different books from YA fiction and simple fiction story except the target audience is YA fiction story tends to be more educational. I mean young adult or teenage can learn something more from it than normal fiction story. FTW is a reflection of our world now. The global economy gets a fully representation in FTW, but in a more interesting way. Cory showed us a whole new digital global world in FTW. How this world works and what different role people play in this world. In the novel, American lazy players pay money to Chinese and Indian player to level up their gaming role. That is pretty same like what our world economy is now. American people enjoy the made in China and made in India products. And American people overly rely on those products in their lives. In novel, Indian and Chinese player get too much advantage that no one can beat them in game. Pretty same like the condition in the real world. Cory is trying to teach his audience what our world is like right now by introducing the world of multi-role games. Cory’s idea about internet economy or digital economy is pretty educational and prospective. FTW is published in 2010, So actually Cory has forecasted the future economy world. And right now in 2015, the digital economy has became the biggest entity in the world. The digital economy gets developed in every countries especially in some developing countries like China and India. And all those get very meticulously described in FTW. Also, in the second chapter, Cory introduced a lot of idea about arbitrage. I am pretty sure that all readers can get some inspiration from this novel. That’s one of the reason why I believe it should be seem as an YA novel.