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Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot
by Julian Dibbell
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Basic Books (2006-07-10)
ISBN: 0465015352
EAN: 9780465015351
Dewy Decimal #: 793.932
Hardcover: 336 pages
SKU: 07110159
Condition: Very Good Very Good
Comments: Hardback in very good condition with no markings. Dust jacket in very good condition with minor shelf wear. Tight binding and clear crisp text. Very nice book.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Play Money 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 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.
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Customer Reviews
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Not just a bunch of smoke
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-06-09
You know those books that promise you untold wealth and secrets to make you rich? This isn't one of them, which makes it one of the best reads I've seen in a while. It gives a realistic depiction of making money in virtual economies (which is pretty amazing in and of itself). It even explores and gives some interesting perspectives on work vs. play and the emergence and confidence of virtual economies.
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A Fascinating Look at Virtual Economies...
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-12-17
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Play Money, [...] Amazon.com, is an enjoyable three hundred page softbound book from Indiana author Julian Dibbell. Prior to this particular effort, Dibbell also authored another non-fiction book entitled My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. Dibbell is currently a contributing editor for Wired magazine, and he's also had several lengthy pieces published in Details, Harper's, Le Monde, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Spin, Time, and the Village Voice.
Laughingly, Dibbell began selling virtual goods to members of online gaming communities - EverQuest, Final Fantasy, Star Wars Galaxies, Ultima Online, and World of Warcraft. - in hopes of developing a second career in early 2003. His goal was to get rich, document the process for a blog and book, and then exit. But while Dibbell started this venture optimistically - mingling with various weirdoes along the way - he lost his marriage due to this financial pursuit.
Aside from that downer, Dibbell's book soars when examining legal implications of virtual economies. Dibbell introduces Blacksnow Interactive - a company that mined wealth from the in-game economy of Dark Age of Camelot early on in Chapter Two. Mythic Entertainment owns intellectual property rights to Dark Age of Camelot and frowned upon in-game items being auctioned on eBay. Soon thereafter, President Mark Jacobson called Meg Whitman and shut those auctions down. Prompting lawsuits.
You sense Dibbell was skeptical when he began writing about MMO economies in 2002. Dibbell discovered John Dugger had bought a virtual house (for $750) previously owned by Troy Stolle inside Britannia, the mythical world of Ultima Online. Dibbell couldn't fathom why anyone would do this for a game, so he interviewed the 29-year-old Indianapolis construction worker that sold the house, and interviewed the 43-year-old Stillwater bread delivery man that bought the house.
Much of Play Money concentrates on the vagaries of play, work, and a condition called flow. Dibbell also introduces us to [...] - reseller of second-hand items that mines wealth from the in-game economy of Ultima Online in Chapter Six. Bob Kiblinger, sole proprietor of [...], first spotted Stolle's UO account for sale on eBay. He then bought the account for $500, split up the items, then sold Stolle's virtual digs to Dugger for $750.
Of the people profiled here, West Virginian Kiblinger comes off as the most likable. It's implied Kiblinger derives a six figure income off his online bartering, and that he has $15k tied up in "online inventory" at any given moment, but all of that could disappear at any given moment. For some reason though, Electronic Arts has chosen not to go after [...], unlike what happened between Mythic Entertainment and Blacksnow Interactive.
Next, Dibbell compares the imaginary gold of UO to e-gold's gram. Launched in 1996, e-gold is one of six metal-backed currencies circulating online. Dibbell further compares the gold of UO to the Ithaca Hour, a paper currency launched in Ithaca during 1991 and backed by local labor. Finally, Dibbell compares the gold of UO to crypto cash - secure untraceable digital money proposed by mathematician David Chaum that lives on in finance geek sub communities.
Eventually, Kiblinger informs Dibbell of a suspicious gold devaluation, and both realize another player called Ingotdude is involved in "gold farming." In short - Ingotdude was running a bot (composed of 22 PCs, each running a copy of the game, with characters in macro mode) inside Ultima Online which was generating real world payouts on the order of more than $300k. Dibbell is amused to later find that Blacksnow Interactive is behind Ingotdude's exploit.
You'll be surprised to learn that over the course of a year, Dibbell did manage to earn $47,000 by selling intangible virtual goods online through Play Money. His goal was to earn more than $55k (his best year as a writer) but he failed in that respect. Spending 50 hours a week online cost Dibbell his marriage and emotional collapse, but his career eventually recovered and he did manage to finish this exceptional book.
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Not worth it.
Rating  (1)
Date: 2007-11-29
3 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
This is really just another blog-turned-book, with a little bit of filler. The title misrepresents the book - he didn't quit his day job and he didn't even hit his fairly modest goal of a month's earnings exceeding his best as a writer, which is far short of the "millions" the subtitle advertises. I'd give him a pass if the title was obviously sarcastic, but it seems like a cheap ploy to up sales figures. The real slap comes about halfway through the book when blog posts are reproduced wholesale, which can easily be found on the internet on Dibbell's website.
Dibbell is a good writer, but this book just doesn't come close to delivering. If you want a basic account of how you could have exploited Ultima Online five years ago, then by all means, this is the book for you. For everyone else, it's an extended blog post - a quick, basic read that doesn't have a whole lot of substance to it.
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Playing Video Games for MONEY -- REEL FUN!
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-04-24
3 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
What if you could spend your day playing video games and still make a fortune? Wll, now it's possible for the best of what is called the 'gold farmers' to play games and buy and sell fantasy goods in the virtual world and make between 6 and 7 figures a year! Yes, and this author Julian Dibbell did just that -- quit his day job as a writer and became a virtual mogul. Along the way in 12 chapters he looks at the virtual marketplace for virtual loot and the growing economy online in multiplayer online role playing gams MORPGS and Virtual worlds like SecondLife.com to buy and sell virtual real estate, avatars, islands, services and even real life objects in virtual stores. From Ultima Online to paying the IRS -- it's an amazing new world online and whether it's reel or real is still to be determined by the players in the newest game in town.
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Serious Play
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-03-05
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
I read this book because I had begun to hear about the world it describes and wanted to learn more. I was REALLY happy with my purchase! Dibbell combines personal experience, interesting interviews, and a broad intellectual reach to make comprehensible the "brave" "new" world of massive multi-user gaming and the way it is making us rethink a variety of taken for granted forms of common sense.
The result is a lot of fun to read and highly educational at the same time.
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