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

Play Money looks at a new phenomenon of online gaming: massively multiplayer role-playing worlds where hundreds of thousands of people take on fantasy characters in vast virtual lands. These games have grown populations, governments and social systems of their own, along with an economy that spills into everyday life. A growing number of players earn real money by gathering virtual treasures and selling them to others. The author follows this subculture, once treated as a curiosity, and asks what it suggests about the blurring of work and play, and of the virtual and the real. The result is a lively account of a strange corner of the modern economy.