Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot
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- Synopsis
- Play Moneyexplores 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 amonth. Play Moneyis 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.
- Copyright:
- 2006
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- Book Size:
- 336 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9780465003679
- Related ISBNs:
- 9780465015351
- Publisher:
- Perceus Books Group
- Date of Addition:
- 05/28/21
- Copyrighted By:
- Julian Dibbell
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Sociology
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.