Play Money : Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot Paperback / softback
by Julian Dibbell
Paperback / softback
Description
Play Money explores the remarkable new phenomenon of MMORPGs, or Massively MultiPlayer Online Role-Playing Games, in which hundreds of thousands of players operate fantasy characters in virtual environments.
With city-sized populations, 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 otherentertainments in dollar volume, and with the lines between play and work, virtual and real increasingly blurred-look more and more like the future.
Information
-
Out of stock
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:336 pages
- Publisher:Basic Books
- Publication Date:11/09/2007
- Category:
- ISBN:9780465015368
Information
-
Out of stock
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:336 pages
- Publisher:Basic Books
- Publication Date:11/09/2007
- Category:
- ISBN:9780465015368
