# Play Money

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/julian-dibbell/play-money

![Play Money](https://quivercdn.com/covers/basic-books/julian-dibbell/play-money_978-04-6501-536-8.jpg?v=2026-05-13%2023%3A53%3A47)

- Authors: [Julian Dibbell](https://www.bookquiver.com/julian-dibbell)
- Language: en_GB
- Published: 2007-09-11

## Description

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 but now-with computer gaming poised to eclipse all otherentertainments in dollar volume, and with the lines between play and work, virtual and real increasingly blurred-look more and more like the future.

## Editions

### Play Money

- Publisher: basic_books
- ISBN: 978-04-6501-536-8
- Pages: 1
- Published: 2007-09-11
- Language: en_GB