Editors' Rating
Published: 12 Jun 2007
On my first day in Second Life, an interviewee for a news story insisted on paying me 1,000 Linden dollars so my avatar could buy herself some decent clothes. I solemnly reported this instance of graft and corruption to my editor, with a note that L$1,000 converts to about US$3.75 (~£2). My editor felt this was sufficiently trivial not to matter — but in Second Life that amount will buy you several cars. This economic interface between virtual worlds and real life is the subject of Julian Dibbell's book Play Money.
Dibbell has a long history in virtual worlds; an earlier book explored the social and cultural issues surrounding a 'rape' in LambdaMOO. He is openly addicted, and in Play Money his decision to try to make a living selling fantasyware for real money had at least something to do with justifying the amount of time he spent killing lizard men in Ultima Online. His target was to make more money than he did as a journalist, and eventually he gives his best year's number: $55,000.
He dabbled for a while in selling rune books on eBay to tell virtual miners where to dig for ore, fell in love with the house he was supposed to sell at a profit, and ran with cartography tricks. He was facing near-starvation when a big player offered him a job as a supplier.
There are, essentially, two ways to do what Dibbell was trying to do. One is to obey the rules and work through endlessly repetitive tasks. The other is to cheat — and in the old saying, anything worth having is worth cheating for.
Accordingly, over and over again Dibbell found himself coming up against people running bots on clusters of accounts or exploiting bugs in the game. Not play to them: work. Eventually, the rumour he began with — that one of these outfits had staff in Mexico playing all day to acquire saleable goods and accounts — seemed to come true, although in China. He never got to see these sweatshops personally, but The New York Times did.
Dibbell intersperses this tale with meanderings into the history of virtual worlds, philosophy, and economics. Finally, he muses about the possibility that work is converging with play. Why, he asks, shouldn't our work take place in a virtual world?
There's a point there that seems to elude Dibbell, which is that for many people something is only fun when they're not doing it for a living. As soon as your hobby becomes their full-time job, most people go looking for a new hobby.
Dibbell, however, is a writer, and writers are different. Like most of us, he remains interested exactly as long as it takes to get the story. He may be the only one who was surprised to discover that after a year of having much more fun looking for fantasy pots of gold at the ends of rainbows than he ever did writing, he turned the whole thing into a book and became a writer again.
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- The Wealth of Networks
- The Long Tail
- Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American
- Brave New Ballot
- Tough Choices: A Memoir
- Who Controls the Internet?
- Play Money
- Dreaming in Code
