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?
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