Year: 2006

Imagine paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a house you’ll never set foot in—because it doesn’t exist. Every day, legions of people buy virtual merchandise online, including real estate, tools, weapons, and creatures, in a real economy surrounding MMPORGs, or Massively MultiPlayer Online Role-Playing Games. If you aren’t involved in these games yourself, you probably know someone who is; an estimated six million people play World of Warcraft, which is one of dozens of popular MMPORGs, and involvement is growing exponentially—as is the amount of cash surrounding these games. So much money is generated within the game world of EverQuest II that, calculating its gross national product, it’s estimated to be the seventy-seventh largest economy in the real world.

Author Julian Dibbell writes about this phenomenon in Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job And Struck It Rich in Virtual Loot Farming, out July 31. He challenged himself to see if he could exceed his real-life pay as a freelance writer for magazines like Wired, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice by selling virtual goods online.

So can you earn more money playing video games than writing?
Yeah. People can make six figures. Once I got going, I was making more money every month, and in the last month, I made $3,900 profit. If I’d stuck with that business, there’s no doubt that I would have made that much, or maybe even more, and averaged over a year, that would have been about forty-seven thousand dollars a year. Selling virtual goods probably would have been a better career choice for me, but I don’t think I was put on this earth to do retail.

Why would someone want to pay real money for fake things?
It’s all part of the experience. We have these magical, potentially utopian spaces online that are essentially the kind of world we’ve always wanted to live in. Fascinating people from around the world are there. But the spaces people are really drawn to, the worlds people actually pay subscription rates to use and spend a lot of time in, actually have a lot of constraints and challenges. In the end, we don’t like perfection, and the chance to overcome virtual difficulties gives people enormous satisfaction.

Aside from the cash, how much do these game worlds bleed into real life?
There’s this meme going around that World of Warcraft is the new golf, meaning that it’s become a professional meeting ground for people, with all the good and bad that that implies. Like golf, the people who don’t play are on the outside. But people do get to know other players. It’s like if you were playing poker with somebody. You’d talk about things apart from the game. These online games are the same way. It’s very enmeshed in real-life identity, not hermetically sealed off.

Do you think playing these games is training the next generation to interact differently?
To an extent, playing these games fosters a kind of thinking and level of cooperation that hasn’t been seen outside of the military. There’s been some glib talk in the business world along the lines of, “I’d rather hire a [game world] guild leader than an MBA,” because the people skills required to successfully manage a guild really are quite intense. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a generation of thinkers shaped by playing these games. It’s one thing to play a single-player game, it’s another to play a four-way game of Monopoly in which you’re going to be the top gun against five or six people. But to be achieving against the backdrop of a population of hundreds of thousands of other players adds so much weight to the achievement, because there’s such a rich social context surrounding your play.

Are that many people really into this?
When you start playing these games, you start to discover all sorts of people who are “game geeks” like yourself. I was showing our house to prospective renters, and one guy who came over was an established professor of labor history, and he saw I had Dark Age of Camelot on, and it turned out he was a serious player of this game. A lot of people you wouldn’t expect to be gamers are involved, and in deep.

So, how much time a day do you spend playing?
Umm … So who’s going to be reading this?

Spending hours essentially motionless, neck-deep in art supplies, trying to draw a believable rendition of Halifax, Nova Scotia, with an ear half-cocked to The Young and the Restless wafting in from the living room—this is when Ryan Kelly tends to get a moment of clarity. “You have to make yourself a little nutty to draw comics for a living,” he said recently, chatting over coffee at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Kelly’s not a superheroes-and-monsters type of guy, but rather one of the growing wave of comic creators who are wrestling the medium out of the spandex ghetto. His latest effort, produced with writer Brian Wood, is a twelve-issue monthly edition called Local. It’s getting a fair share of attention in the crowded indie-comics world: The five issues published so far by Oni Press have been tremendously well-received. The first sold out nationwide, and Minneapolis’ Big Brain Comics reported that they sold more copies of Local #2—which takes place in that city—than that month’s blockbuster crossover from DC Comics. This is akin to a Wes Anderson movie outdoing MI:3 at the box office.

Following twelve years in the restless life of a young woman, Megan, each issue is set in a different city, with a stand-alone story that chronicles her personal growth. Local, Kelly said, is intended to be completely accessible to any reader. “You don’t have to read the previous issues to get it. You can pick up any issue and the story starts on page one—it’s fulfilled; there’s closure at the end.”

Much of the praise for the comic centers on its artwork. “Kelly’s forte appears to be the ability to ground the shifting locales and rotating, aging characters in a consistent reality,” wrote Matthew Craig, a critic for the comics website Ninth Art. “His character designs are superb, from the Jagger-mouthed co-star of issue #2 to the freckles on the protagonist’s face.” Indeed, Kelly’s characters hit the sweet spot between realism and cartoony impressionism; the small exaggerations to their features serve to heighten emotional impact. Even more impressive are Kelly’s streetscapes and interiors. His linework in Local #2 makes the snow and sleet along Lyndale Avenue seem lyrical, and landmarks like Hum’s Liquors (above which Megan lives), the Wedge Co-op (where she shops), and Oarfolkjokeopus (her workplace, which is now Treehouse Records) are lushly rendered with evocative, flowing brushstrokes.

As the series was in development, Kelly lobbied Wood for a Twin Cities location, wanting “the excitement of seeing my home depicted in a comic.” Minneapolis won out over St. Paul because of suitability for the story and the strong comic-scene support there, but it was hardly a walkover: “St. Paul is much more visually appealing to the eye than Minneapolis,” Kelly said. “It’s been much better at preserving its architectural heritage and stately riverfront charm. I would have had more fun, as an artist, drawing St. Paul.” He would also love to do a comic set in the “banal and beautiful” Duluth, and even (although he wouldn’t want to live there) in “the cul-de-sacs of our sprawling suburbs.”

Despite the jokes about spending his days eating cereal and watching TV, Kelly’s penciling-and-inking life is hardly leisurely. The work piles up, he said, “and the only world you know is your little eight-foot-square studio space.” That’s when he starts likening his brain to a balky team of sled dogs who have to be goaded along to the finish line. When talk radio and the aforementioned Y&R fail to provide enough stimulation, he turns to the world outside: “My art gets worse if it’s just about what I read in the paper and what’s in my own weird imagination. It’s never reached its full potential until I go out to be around people and experience spaces or people or buildings.”

While studying at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Kelly had a goal to become “the next Michelangelo,” but comics has turned out to be a good niche for him. Even though some comics auteurs have made the jump to Hollywood—indie-comics titan Dan Clowes (Ghost World, Art School Confidential) and Frank Miller (Sin City) being two famous examples—collaborating with film-industry types doesn’t appeal to Kelly. “They only like stuff that’s tried and true and they know will make money. In comics,” he pointed out, “you can still take chances.”

In 1970, Bob Rabin had flunked out of law school and was in search of a Plan B. A friend from Sheboygan, his hometown in Wisconsin, helped him land a job at KQRS, a fledgling station that was then headquartered in a small house in Golden Valley. Manager Dick Poe had just abandoned jazz format in favor of a format he called “progressive rock”—Eric Clapton, The Allman Brothers, Black Sabbath, and such—which was just catching on with the youth, hippies in particular.

“You’d get there in the morning and somebody would have left a cake,” Rabin remembered. Other fans showed their admiration in more novel ways. “In the 1970s there was this thing called streaking. Every once in a while someone would run through the station naked.” Then there were the groupies who would hang outside the sound booth, waiting for a certain good-looking deejay named Russell Russ to end his shift. “It was like a dream. There were so many interesting people involved,” said Rabin. He held his hand over his eyes and shook his head, as if trying to knock loose the memories.

While the jocks were spinning The Moody Blues and winning the attention of nubile women, Rabin was doing the less glamorous work of selling advertising for the station. In 1984, he would jump ship to Cities 97, when it, too, was a fledgling radio station, and he remains employed there today. Walking with a visitor through the St. Louis Park offices of Clear Channel, Cities 97’s corporate parent, coworkers greeted Rabin with a strange sort of reverence: Some did their best Wolfman Jack-style yips, while others emulated Rabin’s Milwaukee-ese.

Rabin is a fair-skinned, slope-nosed, stout fellow. He has huge, rounded shoulders that seem to swallow his neck. He admits to being a little world-weary after toughing it out in the business so long, having witnessed the radical, rather rapid progression to highly formatted, computer-driven radio from days when, as Rabin recalled, a jock could play love songs all night if he so pleased. He enjoyed similar liberties in the early days of his career. “When I was twenty-five, I had complete freedom. I set my own prices, I set my own hours. Now I’m in a situation at sixty years old where everything is completely structured.” Nevertheless, he has hung onto a jocular style of doing business, which can make him seem rather hapless and also endear him to clients.

Rabin pointed out a 70s-era photo of himself on his cubicle wall. “That’s how I really look,” he said. Running his hand over a bald spot and through his ring of gray hair, “This is just an impersonation of me.” Stumping around the office in khaki slacks and blue checked dress shirt, he hardly looks the part of the rebel he professes to be. “That guy on WKRP, Herb Tarlek, all the other guys used to look like him. They had plaid jackets and striped ties. And I was the guy walking around with a beard. I was calling on head shops and concert promoters. I never wore a suit. My hair was down to there. One day after work I was sitting outside with my neighbors when they asked, ‘What is it you do for a living?’ I said, ‘I sell advertising for a radio station.’ And they said, ‘Oh my God, we thought you were a drug dealer!’ ”

Still, certain concessions were made in order to bring in money. For instance, Rabin found potential advertisers he was calling on around the Twin Cities were put off by his real name, Rabinovitz. “I came from Sheboygan, where we had names like Latenschlager. But everyone up here was named Olson. They couldn’t pronounce my name! The first week, I was calling, leaving messages, and no one was calling me back. What I realized is that people up here in Minnesota don’t want to offend anyone. So rather than try to pronounce the name, they just wouldn’t call me back.”

Longevity in any career has its perks; in radio, some of them can involve celebrities. Rabin can rattle off a long list of encounters—everyone from Waylon Jennings to President Bush, Prince, and Emeril Lagasse. His all-time favorite rub was with Jerry Lewis, his idol, whom he met backstage at Orchestra Hall some twenty years ago.

Then there was his brush with John Lennon. It was 1975, and Tac Hammer, a legendary KQRS on-air personality and production manager, was listening in on a media conference call with the former Beatle, who was then plugging Rock-N-Roll, a tribute album to 50s- and 60s-era rock. Hammer handed Rabin the phone. “Some production director is just raking John over the coals—saying, ‘What do you want to do a Buddy Holly song for?’ And I’m listening in and I’m just furious! But of course, I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want Tac to be mad at me. And then a couple years later John Lennon is dead! And I could’ve stuck up for him! It’s one of those things you regret.”

“Dig around and find something!” Steve Jevning said, poking through a box of doll heads. “That’s how we do it here. See it, touch it, if something talks to you, grab it!” Jevning is the founder and executive director of Leonardo’s Basement, a South Minneapolis educational center for children of all ages. In a space beneath the Anodyne Coffee Shop on Nicollet Avenue, kids can do anything from computer animation to welding to mummifying Barbie dolls. The place is packed to its dusty rafters with the detritus of salvage shops, electronics warehouses, armament factories, and other enterprises that donate materials. As the pirate captain of this strange organization, Jevning presides over nearly two dozen instructors; in summer the place kicks into high gear, tripling the number of classes it offers.

With his close-cropped hair sprinkled with dust and wood shavings, wireless specs, and muscular hands, Jevning looks every bit the mad inventor. He surveyed the room, his eyes lighting up at a humble cigar-box banjo. “Look at that,” he whispered, admiring its simple design. He absentmindedly began to pluck out a tune. “Children today are a generation removed from Dad’s garage, which is too bad. They’re swept away with Game Boys and television, and there’s not as many cool things to take apart today.” He pulled out his cell phone. “I mean, tear the cover off this and … well, good luck.”

Jevning was once a conventional teacher—the profession runs in his family—but he chafed at all the rules and methods, so he went for remodeling and construction instead. “I hate this miserable return to the Victorian Age, where kids are vessels to be filled, this every-child-left-behind crap,” he said. When he was a student, he pointed out, if he didn’t like a subject in school, he was glad to fail. But then Steve’s fourth-grade son grew bored of his science class and asked his dad to help him and some friends “mess around” after school. Jevning saw this as an opportunity to expand his son’s education. They rented a space at the Center for Performing Arts and organized an inventors fair. That slowly evolved into classes, fund-raisers, and, finally, Leonardo’s Basement.

Jevning’s classes are designed to engage children’s imaginations, teach them simple physics, and give them the confidence to both break and build things en route to solving problems and creating art. And always they’re just plain fun. Steve pointed to a rather creepy plastic fish with a Barbie-doll head swapped in for a fish head, and its tail fashioned from a larger doll’s hand. It looked like something Duchamp might have played with as a child. “That’s from our ‘Re-Imagined Toys’ class,” he said proudly, as one might talk about the provenance of a valuable sculpture. “Kids get a perverse fascination tearing apart Barbies.”

Leading a visitor down a cluttered corridor, lined with shelves spilling over with plastic tubes and wires, Jevning seemed to be lost in his own mind. “This place is purposely chaotic. Kids need to be given the freedom to roam. The more freedom, the more they expand their space, the more they learn.” He gestured around the room, whose every corner was piled with junk that could be turned into a working machine or work of art: stacks of old keyboards, physics books leaning against doll heads, an upright piano with its innards exposed, medical supplies, blank cds, wood scraps, and wheels—dozens and dozens of wheels. “If we had a giant space they’d make giant stuff!” It appears that if Steve had a giant space, he would make giant stuff as well. “We’d get physical, too. We’d have ropes and pulleys so they could climb. Really get these kids going.”

Enrollment at Leonardo’s Basement is robust—by mid-May there were waiting lists for all the summer sessions—but it is also, not surprisingly, always on financial edge. Jevning is responsible for coming up with a budget, working with donors, and, perhaps most difficult, hunting down teachers who embody the spirit of the school. Too often adults try to impose their own style on the kids, without allowing them their freedom. Good teachers often don’t stay, as their ambitions often send them down a different path.

By summer’s end, children around the city will have floated across Lake Harriet on giant water insects, reconstructed digested mice from owl pellets, and undoubtedly created something no one at the center has ever built before—that spirit of invention is the core of Leonardo’s Basement. As an example of this, Steve stood beside what looked to be a spaceship cockpit. “This is a spaceship cockpit,” he announced. “One of the kids wanted this, so we made it”—using old oscilloscopes, dashboards from music machines, console boards and plenty of gold paint. “Someday this is going to control parts of the basement. The lights, temperature—it will really work. That’s what this place is all about: giving the new da Vincis a salon of their own.”

There once lived a very rich man in Hudson, Wisconsin, who suffered from manic-depressive disorder. A couple of years ago, during an upswing, he drove to Seattle and bought five cars at an auction. Among them were a purple mid-eighties Jaguar with gold trim and rims, and a 1972 red Mercedes convertible. I first saw the cars during an auction preview at the Red Barn in Spring Valley, Wisconsin. Even with her delicate bloom of Tropical Nights air freshener, the old Jaguar attracted only snickers from the Carhartt-and-coveralls crowd. The Mercedes had many more suitors. One by one, they sunk into the driver’s seat—the car had black leather upholstery as soft as Roy Rogers’ saddle—and turned the key, to no avail. They pulled up her hood and poked around. Even their fluency with engines of every kind could not arouse the low-slung beauty.

Inside the Red Barn’s auction hall, Jack Hines stepped up to the podium and intoned the invocation he uses for some two hundred auctions a year: “Folks … ” With sons Jeff at his side and John in front of the portable computer cart recording transactions, Hines spent the next four hours selling hundreds of things left behind by the deceased, divorced, broke, or retired. Over the past forty years, countless pieces of Pierce County history have passed through his hands. Every object—from grandfather clock to writing desk to bagel cutter to Twins pennant—was once new and valued. Hines’ job is to connect these things with the folks who can put a dollar amount on that value.

“We’re going to start ’er off at ten dollars, who’ll give me ten dollars? How about five, who’ll give me five, no one? One. One dollar. Who’ll give me one? One? And one! We’ve got one, now who’ll go two, two dollars, we’re at two, do I hear three? OK, we’ll sell this the hard way, $2.50, do I hear $2.50? $2.50! Now three dollars?”

At the previews, antiques dealers and serious collectors can be identified by the big Rubbermaid tubs they carry and the stacks of newspaper (for breakable items) under their seats. Gun and coin auctions bring masses of people who sit with thick price guides like hymnals in their laps. Everyone’s searching for treasures, or at least something of use, but some country-auction offerings are particularly sad. They usually come in lots jumbled together in cardboard box lids. Too many copies of National Geographic, Sean Cassidy records, and rusty old colanders can make an auction feel like a garage sale. Other auctions open doors into private lives, like the small stacks of vintage nudie photographs sold in the driveway outside a dead man’s storage facility one very cold day in Ellsworth a couple of years ago. A mysterious man in a dark cloak paid more than five hundred dollars for the bunch, an obscene amount.

“Folks,” Hines said, “Bob, a very well-known and past highway commissioner for years, was taken from us by the dear Lord and so to settle the estate, the following personal property will be sold at auction.” Among the listings were houseplants. The houseplants were fresh because the auction was held quickly; the same week as the obit.

Hines led us outside to the lineup of cars, lawn mowers, jet skis, go-karts, and unidentifiable farm implements. The Jaguar went for the price of a K car. The snickering stopped abruptly as the clump of thirty or forty guys put on their poker faces for the Mercedes. After I won it, my mechanic husband reached under the hood, reconnected the vacuum hose he’d seen hanging loose and started the car.

I’ve hit a few other jackpots, like a first edition of Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums (paid four dollars, sold it for four hundred dollars) and the four Red Wing plates (bought for less than ten dollars, sold for seventy dollars apiece on eBay). Hines knows when he’s holding hot stuff, but he never shows it. He gives knives with swastikas the same “Gosh, what have we got here?” demeanor as he does with two-thousand-dollar John Deere signs or broken mantle clocks.

“Folks, this clock looks like it’s missing one hand, but”—he turns to Jeff—“you know what they could do with that?”

“What’s that?” says Jeff, without missing a beat.

“They could buy the next clock, take the hand off that one, and put it on this one!”

Before I drove off in the Mercedes, trailed by the glares of the losing bidders, a woman approached me. “I hope you enjoy that car, it’s a beauty.” She had once been married to the man who’d bought the car. She, like the cars, was another casualty of his illness. His name turned out to be a familiar one in western Wisconsin. He’d shipped four of the cars from Seattle and driven the Mercedes back home in a manic storm of snow and sleeplessness. Apparently he got hungry somewhere in the middle of North Dakota, pulled over, and without getting out of the car, got out a rifle and started shooting at some elk. He was arrested and spent a night in jail; then he returned to Hudson and hung himself from the light fixture in his living room. His ex-wife and daughters turned to Hines to sell off the estate.

Later I would find condoms and piles of burned-out disposable lighters under the seat of my graceful and classic—and amazingly fast—car. I drove it for a couple of summers, then put it up on eBay. I made a slim profit and, after an astonishingly easy procedure, shipped the Mercedes to her happy new owner in the United Arab Emirates.

On a hot Fourth of July, as I ate oddly flavored brown stew off a rusty plate and downed fake whiskey from my tin cup, all while seated outside at a wooden table with a crowd of people watching, I started feeling like a capuchin monkey at the zoo. This was all part of my summer job: eating and talking with my fellow soldiers for the entertainment and edification of visiting families, schoolchildren, and history buffs. In fact, almost every one of my daily activities, from mundane chores like chopping wood to more exciting activities such as firing muskets, was on display for people to watch. They often did.

The work was real, but the life on display was a fabrication. This was a paradox that was sometimes difficult to grasp. For a costumed interpreter at Historic Fort Snelling, the worlds of reality and make-believe overlapped in many instances. I donned the uniform of a private in the United States Army of the late 1820s, learned to march, fire muskets and cannons, and generally attempted to live the 1827 life of Private Kelly, an Irish immigrant from Boston.

But often it was hard to tell where the pretending ended. I was never quite sure what visitors thought was real and what they considered fake; as for my fellow historical interpreters, some of them still occasionally called me Private Kelly at the day’s end, when I was once again wearing my T-shirt and sandals.

It didn’t help that all the chores and daily routines from our 1827 show would go on with or without twenty-first century onlookers. Usually, by the time the fort would close for the day, the last visitors had already returned to the world of microwave burritos and Internet shopping. Yet we soldiers faithfully conducted the retreat ceremony—an inspection of the men, followed by a saluting of the flag as it’s lowered—with no one looking on except for others in period dress. An officer would stroll past us men in line, remarking on unpolished brass or stained trousers, doing so in such hushed tones that anyone who had been watching this elaborate ritual would have been somewhat mystified. If it served any conceivable purpose, it was to bring us interpreters closer to believing what we were doing wasn’t just for play, but was real.

Many things were both. For the sake of the fictional Private Kelly, I shaved my red beard into the thick mutton chops that went out of style after Martin Van Buren. Yet, hanging out at bars on the weekends or with friends who hadn’t seen me in a while, I got a few odd glances and many questions. Though the side-whiskers looked out of place without their accompanying high-collared shirt and a pocket watch, I couldn’t exactly say, “These mutton chops aren’t mine.”

Similarly, the weddings performed between soldiers and laundresses were not legally binding, but in at least one case, the bride and groom were actually romantically involved—sweetening each other’s tea, as it were. And when Private Kelly wrote a letter to his sweetheart with a quill pen and ink, I was able to perpetuate my own world of fantasy by mixing in reality, penning a letter to my real-life love interest in the guise of the girl Private Kelly had left behind in Boston.

While camera-toting tourists could maintain a certain distance from the theatrical display (after all, they weren’t stoking a wood fire in pantaloons and a wool vest), the whole thing was a bit more complicated for us interpreters. It became frightfully easy to shift between one’s self and one’s character, or vice versa. When visitors stepped into the barracks, we 1827-era soldiers could speak in historically accurate terms about the jobs we were performing in the twenty-first century: “Are we having inspection today?” or “How did Jones end up on guard duty again?” Was it Private Kelly or me who ventured the punishable, “It’s too hot to chop wood today”? If someone called me a dirty, drunken Irishman, should I take offense (I’m only part Irish, after all), and did the guy behind the soldier’s guise really mean it? Even when we gathered outside the fort, at work potlucks and picnics, most people still referred to one another by their fictional names, and conversations often turned to different types of gun powder or how best to hand-stitch a dress.

Like those monkeys, we were real people living in an elaborately contrived, yet seemingly authentic environment. Do captive capuchins realize that their rainforest ends at the concrete wall just past the flamingos? At Fort Snelling, we costumed guides didn’t have that wall—it was something each of us needed to erect and come to understand for ourselves. This seems like pretty decent advice for life in general.