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Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot
Basic Books
July 2006
On Sale: June 28, 2006
321 pages
ISBN: 0465015352
EAN: 9780465015351
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
From the writer acclaimed as "our hot link to the
intricacies of cyberspace"--a wild ride to the outer limits
of the virtual world, where real money meets fantasy gaming
(Kit Reed, author of Weird Women, Wired Women)
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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