I came home last night and found Julian Dibbell's Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot waiting for me. And sat down and read it all in one sitting.

Entire parallel economies exist in these worlds, and they can be quite addictive. One of the reasons we started Ludicorp to build the Game Neverending, was my addiction to Neopets, where I was making a killing arbitraging JubJub hats (until the bottom dropped out of the whole JubJub market, as suddenly and inexplicably, JubJub hats were being fed into the marketplace at an astonishing rate). Dibbell spent most of his time in Ultima Online, a sword and sorcery MMOG, but sometimes, it seems, the real cloak and dagger activity isn't happening in the game, but behind the scenes, where quasi-criminals devise ingenious cheats to raise game money, which they then sell on eBay, possibly even running Chinese and Tijuana sweatshops on the side where workers are employed to level up and generate even more game money. A fascinating account. Even though I'd spent a lot of time in these worlds, Dibbell raised a lot of interesting questions, and conjectured a world where work is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from play. And I loved this:

LINK | 7:56 PM | TB

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