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Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot by Julian Dibbell documents a fantasy built on a fantasy: one man’s quest to earn more money in the online MMORPG Ultima Online in a year than he does as a writer for Wired magazine. Along the way we gain insight into the nature of addiction and the increasingly blurry line between work and play.

We’ve all heard of online game worlds like Everquest, World of Warcraft, and Second Life. Play Money pulls us into economies set up within these virtual realities that cross over to our own: sale of in “in game” items for dollars. The scarcity of some digital goods (or the time it takes to acquire them) inevitably presents a real-world money making opportunity - people are willing to pay good money for them. Enter a complex web of enterprising ideas: the search for loopholes (glitches where cooked food is worth multiples more than raw), characters controlled by macros (which can get you banned), or the infamous sweat shops in other countries where “gold farmers” are paid low wages to repeat one repetitive task all day such as clicking on a rock to extract gold.

A side plot is Dibbell’s descent into MMORPG addiction. He starts off as a casual reporter, observing how one obsessed player has constructed a dark room in his garage where he spends several hours each day playing Ultima Online. But before you can say “n00b” Dibbell himself is playing the game. He challenges himself to earn more in one year via Ultima Online than he does as a freelance writer.

Soon, Dibbell has quit his job in the Bay Area, moves to Indiana, and almost inevitably, he’s obsessed with minutiae of power scrolls, put undue strain on his family, and involved with some shady, near mafia-like gold brokers who nearly control the monetary supply of Ultima Online through the amount of items they possess. He sinks into depression and his marriage starts to fail. Eventually, he’s on the road, logging in via truck stops in an increasingly futile attempt to meet his monetary goal before the end of the tax year.

I found this journey amusing because I still consider games entertainment. It doesn’t seem like Julian was having much fun. But once “play” has a monetary value attached, it becomes work very quickly. This book suggests that the blurring between work and play will become more common in a post-industrial society where the search for “frictionless” economies dealing in digital goods is increasingly lucrative (think Google or Enron). He duly mentions how our “real world” monetary system is no longer linked to the gold standard; we all traffic in “play money.”

The book does have some flaws. Near the end of his quest, Julian lowers his original goal of earning an annual salary, by reducing it to one month. Meaning, instead of earning 50K in a year he eventually says earning 4,000 dollars in one month would be good enough. Never mind maintaining 4K over the course of twelve months. Basically, he cheats (still, earning 4K in a month from an online game ain’t too shabby. You’ll have to read the book yourself to find out if he succeeded). Second, the book contains much material pulled from the blog he maintained as events transpired, making me wonder if should just read the blog instead.

Still, this is a fun, entertaining book - I polished it off in two days.

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