Product Description
A wild ride to the outer limits of the virtual world, where real money meets fantasy gaming. 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 … More >>

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