About the Book

"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.

Product Details

Media: Paperback Book, 321 pages

Language: English

Publisher: Basic Books (AZ) (Sep. 30th, 2007)

ISBN-10: 0465015360

ISBN-13: 9780465015368

Dimensions: 5.36 x 8.04 x 0.91 inches

Shipping Weight: 0.70 lbs

• Categories: Business Biography & Business Autobiography General E-Commerce