For the Win is the second young adult science fiction novel by Canadian author Cory Doctorow. It was released in May 2010. The novel is available free on the author's website as a Creative Commons download, and is also published in traditional paper form by Tor Books.

The book is centered on massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Even though the novel is targeted toward young adults, it takes on significant concepts such as macroeconomics and labor rights. It covers the new and fast evolving concept of virtual economy. It also deals with MMORPG specific topics like gold farming and power-leveling.

In the near future, virtual economies play a key role in geopolitics. These economies share a common virtual world known as “game-space”, essentially a more evolved form of the Internet with no borders or separate countries. However, in game-space, income inequality is staggeringly high and exacerbated by the exploitative practices of robber baron-type figures, including Boss Wing and Mr Banerjee.

Matthew Fong lives in Shenzhen, China. He uses his talents at gold-farming to find the optimal way to earn virtual gold in a dungeon in minimal time. Together with a couple of friends and roommates, they leave their greedy employer Boss Wing, a virtual economy kingpin who steals their profits. Matthew finds a place in the fictional MMORPG Svartalfaheim Warriors where it is possible to earn much more gold in a short time, and exploits this to make a month's living in a single night, before the administrators of the game discover and block him. However, Boss Wing sends his goons to raid Matthew's home and beat him up to lure him back; they agree that Matthew can work on his own but has to surrender 60% of his income to Boss Wing, who handles turning game-gold into real money for him in turn.

Leonard Goldberg is a wealthy American boy in Los Angeles. His father built up a big shipping company, but Leonard is mostly interested in playing games with his guilds in China. He teaches himself Mandarin and takes on the pseudonym "Wei-Dong" (meaning "strength of the East"). His team mentors other Angelenos in leveling up their avatars for money in another game, Savage Wonderland. After one customer makes a series of missteps, they nearly fail but Wei-Dong is able to save them with luck. His stern, disapproving father discovers him playing at night due to time differences and decides to send his son off to a boarding school, Martindale Academy, for better discipline. On the way there, they get into a car accident and amidst the confusion, Wei-Dong manages to run away to Santee Alley, where he rents a cheap room and starts to live on his own, making money as Mechanical Turk, a player who slips into NPCs when other players trigger something not implemented in the game's AI. While he barely earns enough to make a living, Wei-Dong enjoys his newfound freedom playing for Coca-Cola Games, a huge subsidiary of The Coca-Cola Company that runs some of the biggest virtual worlds.

Mala moves with her mother and little brother from a small village in India to Mumbai, where her mother hopes to earn a better living. She ends up in a plastic recycling factory in Dharavi. With her friend Yasmin Gardez, Mala plays a game called Zombie Mecha in Mrs Dibyendu's internet cafe for fun after school, but her mastery of tactics and leadership skills quickly attract a huge following who call her General Robotwallah. Soon, she is approached by Mr Banerjee, who recruits her to attack his business rivals in the game, allowing her family to leave the factory and make a better living. One day, her army gets defeated by a mysterious army; their charismatic leader identifies herself to Mala as "Big Sister Nor". Nor tells her that they are trying to recruit and organize game-workers all over the world into the IWWWW (Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, a pun on IWW). The members of the IWWWW similarly call themselves "Webblies", a pun on Wobblies and the web. While companies may move their production from one country to another whenever powerful unions arise, because no borders or separate countries exist in game-space, there will always be a chance to reach the replacement workers and have them join the union, too. Mala dismisses the idea at first, however, and begins to believe the Webblies are sabotaging her career.

Connor Prikkel, a PhD student in economics at Stanford University, develops a mathematical model for predicting values of virtual goods in games based on how much fun the game is. With this discovery (which he calls "Prikkel equations"), he quits his studies and begins speculating on in-game items. Eventually, he makes big wins, and his equations and understanding of the game economies earn him the leader's post in Coca-Cola Games’ Command Central.

Boss Wing locks in his employees at his main office after one of the boys discovers a new way to earn gold quickly. Angered at this lock-in, the boys in Shenzhen go on a wildcat strike, breaking out of the internet cafes, cutting their network connections and protesting in the street out front. Big Sister Nor supports them together with her two co-organizers, The Mighty Krang and Justbob. They talk to the media and spread the word about the strike to all the other Webblies. In addition, the Webblies extend the strike to the online worlds of Mushroom Kingdom, where they use their game characters to fend off Boss Wing’s replacement players attempting to earn gold in-game. Boss Wing retaliates with corrupt virtual detectives known as Pinkerton players, and the Webblies and Pinkerton players fight a huge virtual battle. Conner and his colleagues look on in interest (and even bet on the battle outcome), until they eventually block all the involved player accounts.