PLAY MONEY: OR, HOW I QUIT MY DAY JOB AND MADE MILLIONS TRADING VIRTUAL LOOT

Julian Dibbell

Play Money explores a remarkable new phenomenon that's just beginning to enter public consciousness: MMORPGs, or Massively MultiPlayer Online Role-Playing Games, in which hundreds of thousands of players operate fantasy characters in virtual environments the size of continents. With city-sized populations of nearly full-time players, these games generate their own cultures, governments, and social systems and, inevitably, their own economies, which spill over into the real world. The desire for virtual goods -- magic swords, enchanted breastplates, and special, hard-to-get elixirs -- has spawned a cottage industry of "virtual loot farmers": People who play the games just to obtain fantasy goods that they can sell in the real world. The best loot farmers can make between six figures a year and six figures a month. Play Money is an extended walk on the weird side: a vivid snapshot of a subculture whose denizens were once the stuff of mere sociological spectacle but now -- with computer gaming poised to eclipse all other entertainments in dollar volume, and with the lines between play and work, virtual and real increasingly blurred -- look more and more like the future.

PUBLICATION DETAILS

LANGUAGE	BINDING	EDITION	ISBN	YEAR	PAGES
English	Paperback		9780465015368	2007	336
English	Hardcover		9780465015351	2006	336
English	eBook		N/A	2007	336