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    Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot
    Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot
    Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot
    Audiobook8 hours

    Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot

    Written by Julian Dibbell

    Narrated by Grover Gardner

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Play Money explores a remarkable new phenomenon that's just beginning to enter public consciousness: MMPORGs, 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAscent Audio
    Release dateAug 8, 2011
    ISBN9781596598805
    Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot

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    Reviews for Play Money

    3.5/5

    51 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I have spent many a night playing games on my PC. I can relate. It was an interesting and refreshing read considering this day and age of Covid.
    • 4/5
      I had a chance to see Julian Dibbell give a talk about his latest book, Play Money, at the University of Idaho. He was absolutely engaging, and I’m glad I took the opportunity to pick up a copy of Play Money at the university book store before his presentation. This is definitely the best book about games I’ve read all year, and Dibbell once again manages to make a thoughtful excursion into a compelling story. Play Money focuses on Dibbell’s efforts to make a living selling things he makes/accumulates in the game Ultima Online. He proposes that he can make more money selling virtual goods than he can selling his writing. While his experiment is flawed and doomed, the journey is well worth a read. Dibbell has a way of writing that unites the emotional and intellectual experiences, and the result is part soap-opera and part scholarly dissertation. If you’re the least bit interested in the economics of game worlds or game studies in general, I highly recommend this one.
    • 4/5
      Millions of gold pieces, that is. Dibbell is a journalist who gets sucked into a barely known world of intrigue, crime, and emotion known as massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs). This book was a really exciting read that, at times, I couldn't put down. The author moves from writing a piece or two about this barely known but highly populated secret society of sorts, to getting pulled into having his own 'player' and then trying to make money in the gray and black market of the game selling virtual goods for real money. I would say having some knowledge of online auction sites like eBay, some knowledge of fantasy video games or games like Dungeons and Dragons, and some knowledge of computer networking hardware/internet protocols is helpful, but not necessary. Let's just say if you've never been on the World Wide Web, this book might not be for you. Dibbell is funny and engaging and likeable. However, he becomes more and more emotional and introspective as the book progresses. Frankly, I don't want to know about your self-doubts, marital challenges that, according to you, have nothing to do with being consumed with the game, and your relationship to work. While some readers might enjoy them, the forays into introspection, and into discussing the socio-cultural and cosmological issues of blurring the lines between real reality and virtual reality were much less interesting, more pedantic and didactic, and dull than the twists of getting deeper and deeper into the game. The real gem here is that in his quest, Dibbell meets all kinds of really sketchy people, as well as run of the mill Joes, who, online, are really sketchy people. For example, an Orange County-based true criminal, European hackers, arbitrageurs, thieves, Chinese sweatshop owners, and on and on. At times, when the author is getting deeper into dramas and double-crosses with these people, I couldn't put the book down.All in all, an exciting, gripping expose of a barely known phenomenon, interrupted by periods of dragging legal-ethical essays, peppered with self-loathing.