Play Money
I just picked up and started Julian Dibbell’s new book Play Money and am really enjoying it. It is about farming gold in computer games for money, a topic that interests me both as a player and as someone who is interested in how our economies are becoming more abstract and fragile. Think about what gold farming is, it is working by playing a computer game to sell things to other game players, but these things you sell exist only in the game, can’t be transferred easily and will probably dry up and blow away in a year or two if the game closes. One hundred years ago people farmed, they made stuff and struggled to get by. Now our society has so much slack in it that we can afford to buy phantom castles for a small fortune.
Anyway the book is well written, if you have read any of Julian Dibbell’s other work and enjoyed it you will like this as well. He has a very inclusive writing style that feels as though you are along with him as he muses and his account of writing an article about the Blacksnow Interactive lawsuit is great. This industry is big money as well, estimates put the market at nearly one billion dollars and growing and the tax rules for it are hazy, you can imagine the sort of people that kind of market attracts. I suspect there is some money laundering being done out there as some of the games are selling items at rates that look silly if you count the actual users that are active in the game. I look forward to seeing how this all changes in the next few years, there are signs that companies will simply include this as part of their games in the future which will make regulating and taxing it easier, but for the moment this is an actual wild west part of the internet, and they are becoming rarer and rarer.