Book Review: Play Money

Play Money

This book obviously isn’t for everyone. In it Julian Dibbell describes a long-term project where he set out to make tens of thousands of real dollars by selling and trading virtual possessions in massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, EverQuest, or his own specialty, Ultima Online.

The concept is pretty simple: there’s a magic sword in the game that you want for your character, but you aren’t lucky enough or skillful enough or patient enough to get it. So you go eo eBay or any other countless websites and you fork over $50 or $125 or $300 or whatever in real money to another player so that he meets up with you in the game and gives you the sword. Now consider that many of these games have crafting systems where players can collect raw materials and money that can be used to create the magic sword, and suddenly that simple business transaction blooms into something more. You have low-level suppliers gathering up raw materials. You have craftsmen taking them, organizing them, and creating magic swords. You have logistics managers keeping track of inventory and relaying requests to suppliers for more raw materials based on what’s in demand. You have a sales force posting eBay auctions. You have delivery boys fulfilling the orders and handing over the imaginary swords to characters played by real consumers.

You have, in essence, a supply chain. And just like with real-life supply chains, people are profiting along the way, with the people running things are making thousands of dollars. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Millions of dollars. No, seriously.

The author of Play Money: How I Quit My Day Job and Struck it Rich in Virtual Loot Farming is actually pretty small potatoes in that he only makes $47,000 over a year’s worth of selling his pixilated wares. But Dibbell makes it an interesting read if you can overlook a few overly metaphysical chapters on the nature of play and a few too many droppings of names like Adam Smith or some guy who wrote a paper on all this. The author basically takes us from beginning to end in his attempts at striking it rich in the Ultima Online virtual loot market, giving us insight into how he and some of the major players in the scene made their fortunes. There’s some appropriately geeky explanations of the mechanics of gold “farming” and associated profiteering, and we see how people do it both through honest play/work and through exploiting bugs in the game’s code. We see how hackers devise a way to spontaneously create BILLIONS of gold pieces –enough to completely obliterate the in-game economy if they wanted to– and then lose it all in the face of infighting and blackmail. We even get a glimpse at a Chinese sweat shop where low wage workers are stacked on top of each other and paid to play video games for 12+ hours per day so that they can generate both virtual and real wealth for their overlords. It’s fascinating stuff.

I really only have two chief complaints about the book. The first is that it focusses primarily on Ultima Online, which is an older game I never played. A more current examination of the subject would undeniably center on World of Warcraft, which is the most successful MMOG ever. Still, Diddell’s experiences are what they are, and the mechanics he describes in Ultima Online are no doubt largely applicable to other games in the same vein.

My second complaint, however, is more substantial. The author blatantly ignores the implications that his enterprises have on players who aren’t in it to make money. The unintended effects of gold farmers are not insubstantial. They may cause inflation of the in-game economies. They may try to dominate certain tracts of the game world and make them unfriendly to casual players through harassment, hogging of resources, or outright warfare. And, of course, one gets sick of them spamming “WTB RUNECLOTH X40 STACKS!!!!!!!!” in the chat channels all day and night. Yet Dibbel glosses over all this.

Still, it’s a good read if you’re interested in the topic. I really like how Dibbell makes it a very personal story so that over the course of his efforts I started to feel for the guy –especially at the end when we see it all laid out in hindsight. And Dibbell obviously loves the game and the whole scene. This wasn’t just a book about the ins and outs of gold farming and selling virtual loot. It’s a book about one gamer trying to make a fortune by doing those things in a game that he loves. It’s both entertaining and informative, which is a rare combination.

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