Play Money - by Julian Dibbell (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>Dibbell offers an original look at a cutting-edge subject: online fantasy games with hundreds of thousands of players, and how their enthusiasts pay real-world money for fantasy goods.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><i>Play Money</i> 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 <i>month</i>.<i>Play Money</i> 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.<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br>Over the course of a decade of writing and publishing, <b>Julian Dibbell</b> has established himself as one of the most thoughtful observers of digital culture. His previous book, <i>My Tiny Life</i>, was published to great reviews. Dibbell's essays and articles have appeared in <i>Details, Spin, Harper's</i>, the <i>New York Times, Rolling Stone, Le Monde</i>, the <i>Village Voice</i>, and <i>TIME</i>. Currently a contributing editor for <i>Wired</i> magazine, Dibbell lives in South Bend, Indiana.
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