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.
