Books: Money For Nothing Reviewed

A new type of economy has arrived. This one is based not on gold or the might of sovereign nations, though, but on dragon’s teeth and holograms. These economies exist in gray zones between the real world of cold, hard cash and various virtual worlds hosted on Internet-connected servers around the globe. And despite their basis in fantasy, some of these economies are bigger than those of many countries. These economies have sprung unexpectedly from a type of computer game known as a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG. In an MMORPG, for a few bucks a month, a player can adopt the role of a character in a make-believe online world populated by other human-controlled characters. As players explore this world and overcome various challenges, their characters gain B o o K S skills, wealth, real estate, and some measure of reputation. The precise nature of the world, characters, skills, and so on depends on the game in question, but the basic idea remains the same. In one game, for instance, a player might start off as a lowly peasant fighting off rats with a rusty dagger and eventually graduate to blasting trolls with magic fireballs, while in another, a player could start as a lowly space trader fighting off malfunctioning drones with a welding torch and later graduate to blasting hostile aliens with a plasma cannon. What’s surprising is that these characters and their possessions can have value—sometimes significant value—in the real world. Julian Dibbell explores these fanciful games and their real-world economies in his new book, Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot. While a number of cultural and economic analyses of MMORPGs have already appeared, Dibbell’s account stands out, because he doesn’t just opine from the sidelines, he jumps right in. The core of the book tells of Dibbell’s attempt to make more money, on a monthly basis, buying and selling virtual game items than he has ever earned working as a freelance writer. In this endeavor, Dibbell is not alone— some people reportedly make six figures per month thanks to this kind of trading. The reason it works is because lots of players don’t feel like mining asteroids for hours and hours to get enough metal ore to make new spaceship armor. Instead, they search for someone else with a preexisting stockpile of armor and then either trade game items or game money for the armor within the MMORPG (as the game developers originally intended) or, increasingly often, pay cash for the science-fiction armor in the real world. Players also routinely buy large amounts of the various game currencies for real cash, creating a de facto exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and a game’s gold