Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot [Hardcover]

This book is well-written (mostly) and a good look at an interesting subject. However, the author seems not to trust his own subject, since he constantly moves away from the interesting part of the book (the story of how the strange market in imaginary goods works) in order to pad the book out with boring digressions on watching his daughter play, or even more boring half-baked essays on What It All Means (no surprise that the author is a contributor to Wired magazine.) Still, if you read the reporting parts, which are good, and skip over the self-indulgent, meandering attempts at philosophy, which are not, you'll learn a lot and enjoy yourself.

Julian Dibbell's Play Money is a fantastic contribution to the literature on MMORPGs. Dibbell's My Tiny Life was the book that inspired Larry Lessig to get interested in cyberlaw. Play Money is like My Tiny Life in a fermented form -- a little more mature, a little more powerful, a lot more complicated.

It is set in a fiction that is currently owned by the Microsoft of the games world: Electronic Arts. Play Money starts with Dibbell magically blasting lizard men, then having himself blasted by a superior magician, who insults him on the poor quality of the items on his avatar's corpse and kills his horse out of spite. Then we're off to Tijuana, in search of virtual sweatshops. The lyricism and wit of My Tiny Life is there, but the bloom is off the virtual rose, so to speak, and real violence, theft, duplicity are lurking constantly below the surface of the fiction.

Why? Because it is a book about commerce, mostly, and a peculiar type of black market that Dibbell got to know rather well. Ultima Online's fanciful world of magicians, castles, and knights in armor is the home of very real economies that have emerged in virtual property. And from Dibbell's description, the main movement in the economy is fueled by software exploits and botting.

Dibbell has to struggle with the gears of this trade, because he's really captivated by the fiction, fascinated by the line created between play and work, and curious about the implications of virtual sweatshops for Marxist theory. He has a philosophical bent, but the path of virtual business leads inexorably to the sweatshops in Tijuana and their equivalents: he finds himself becoming ever more cozy with the hackers who engage in something with roughly the same ethical valance as ticket scalping.

What is most amazing about the book, I think, is that he manages to pull off this combination of fantasy, tawdriness, and philosophy with a true page-turner. The scope is huge, but the pace is brisk -- we're alternatively striking out into ludological theory, recounting the mafia-type threats of competing virtual economy hackers, praising the wifi at Flying J truckstops, and recounting how his avatar watered the plants on the roof of his castle in Britannia while his good friend Radny's tailoring scissors went snip-snip-snip downstairs. It's hard to keep track of where the fantasy in this book begins and ends. At a certain point, you start to wonder if it matters.

Play Money is worth reading just to learn about the details of the real-money trade. But it is Dibbell's wonderful knack for words and stories that makes the book sing.

Play money is a fantastic read. It pulls you into its tale of Internet adventure and doesn't let go until the final word. I loved its refusal to separate the author's exploration of internet games, and his meditation on the economies they've generated, from the events of his off-line life -- child care, depresssion, marital break-up. Like a teenager, he starts out killing lizardmen in the fabulous realm of Ultima Online and ends up selling enchanted swords, pieces of gold, and miraculous suits of armor for a living. A real living, not a virtual one. (Is this play or is it work is the question.) The race to see if he can meet a deadline proving that he can earn more selling magic weapons and gold pieces than he can at his day job keeps the pages turning, and the painful -- and sometimes joyful -- unfolding of events in his actual life is riveting.

The book is an elegy to the world of play we lost when adulthood got us, a critique of a workaholic culture so preoccupied with its own games -- er, goals -- that it can't see the value in play, and a love song to fatherhood. And, it's like, totally cool, dude, what can I say?