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

I don't play video games but I do work in finance and I couldn't put the book down. For young people into gaming, it effectively explains supply and demand. For those of us outside of the gaming world, it's a fascinating glimpse into it. Dibbell also illustrates and discloses the affects on his personal life.

Play money is a fantastic read. It pulls you into its tale of Internet adventure and doesn't let go until the final word. I loved its refusal to separate the author's exploration of internet games, and his meditation on the economies they've generated, from the events of his off-line life -- child care, depresssion, marital break-up. Like a teenager, he starts out killing lizardmen in the fabulous realm of Ultima Online and ends up selling enchanted swords, pieces of gold, and miraculous suits of armor for a living. A real living, not a virtual one. (Is this play or is it work is the question.) The race to see if he can meet a deadline proving that he can earn more selling magic weapons and gold pieces than he can at his day job keeps the pages turning, and the painful -- and sometimes joyful -- unfolding of events in his actual life is riveting. The book is an elegy to the world of play we lost when adulthood got us, a critique of a workaholic culture so preoccupied with its own games -- er, goals -- that it can't see the value in play, and a love song to fatherhood. And, it's like, totally cool, dude, what can I say?

Julian Dibbell's Play Money is a fantastic contribution to the literature on MMORPGs. Dibbell's My Tiny Life was the book that inspired Larry Lessig to get interested in cyberlaw. Play Money is like My Tiny Life in a fermented form -- a little more mature, a little more powerful, a lot more complicated. It is set in a fiction that is currently owned by the Microsoft of the games world: Electronic Arts. Play Money starts with Dibbell magically blasting lizard men, then having himself blasted by a superior magician, who insults him on the poor quality of the items on his avatar's corpse and kills his horse out of spite. Then we're off to Tijuana, in search of virtual sweatshops. The lyricism and wit of My Tiny Life is there, but the bloom is off the virtual rose, so to speak, and real violence, theft, duplicity are lurking constantly below the surface of the fiction. Why? Because it is a book about commerce, mostly, and a peculiar type of black market that Dibbell got to know rather well. Ultima Online's fanciful world of magicians, castles, and knights in armor is the home of very real economies that have emerged in virtual property. And from Dibbell's description, the main movement in the economy is fueled by software exploits and botting. Dibbell has to struggle with the gears of this trade, because he's really captivated by the fiction, fascinated by the line created between play and work, and curious about the implications of virtual sweatshops for Marxist theory. He has a philosophical bent, but the path of virtual business leads inexorably to the sweatshops in Tijuana and their equivalents: he finds himself becoming ever more cozy with the hackers who engage in something with roughly the same ethical valance as ticket scalping. What is most amazing about the book, I think, is that he manages to pull off this combination of fantasy, tawdriness, and philosophy with a true page-turner. The scope is huge, but the pace is brisk -- we're alternatively striking out into ludological theory, recounting the mafia-type threats of competing virtual economy hackers, praising the wifi at Flying J truckstops, and recounting how his avatar watered the plants on the roof of his castle in Britannia while his good friend Radny's tailoring scissors went snip-snip-snip downstairs. It's hard to keep track of where the fantasy in this book begins and ends. At a certain point, you start to wonder if it matters. Play Money is worth reading just to learn about the details of the real-money trade. But it is Dibbell's wonderful knack for words and stories that makes the book sing.

At one level, "Play Money" is one person's story of getting immersed in a weird little subset of the online world. "Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games" are basically really huge, really complicated, and apparently really engaging versions of Dungeons and Dragons. Dibbell provides a clear, fun, personal account of his experiences in these games, and tells the story of his attempts to make a real living selling virtual products that are much in demand in these online worlds. But he's not just looking for gold here, real or virtual. He's after answers to big questions. What makes something valuable? What is a market? What is an economy? What kinds of abstractions are we exchanging when we buy a material object, or a service, or a ticket to a movie, and put it on a credit card? In a world where the price of something as simultaneously abstract and material as "pork belly futures" is announced on the radio (in the Midwest, at least), is it really all that odd to put up a virtual store in a fictional place called Brittania, where you sell virtual swords? Is that store any more fictional or real than e-Bay, or than the one Dibbell puts up outside the game world, where he charges real money for these imaginary items? "Play Money" ponders these big questions, but it isn't all Marx and Baudrillard. It's a gripping and funny and sometimes even poignant story, told in a conversational style that's a breeze to read. Dibbell is a great guide through this world, for a newbie like me, because he stops to explain the way things work--the intricacies of the games, of course, but also the arcana of economics and the complexities of computer science--in ways that are clear without ever seeming dumbed down. I've never learned so much from such a page-turner.

Entire parallel economies exist in online virtual worlds, and they can be quite addictive to play in. 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 devised ingenious cheats to raise game money, which they then sold on eBay, possibly even running Chinese and Tijuana sweatshops on the side where workers were employed to level up and generate even more game money. 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.