Play Money
Book: Julian Dibbel. Play Money.
A book on gaming economies, linked to the daily experiences of gamers.
Also check out Dibbel's previous book: My Tiny Life.
Review
By Steven Shapiro:
"This past summer, Julian Dibbell published a new book, Play Money (2006), recounting his experiences on Ultima Online. The book is something of a sequel to My Tiny Life. Like its predecessor, Play Money tells the story of the author's immersion in a virtual world. And both books mix autobiographical narrative with broader theoretical discussions. Nonetheless, there is a substantial shift in focus between the two texts; you can see this by comparing their subtitles. My Tiny Life is subtitled "Crime and Passion in a Virtual World"; whereas Play Money bears the subtitle, "How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot." To put it crudely, the first book is about sex, violence, and revolution; while the second is about money. My Tiny Life chronicles the social life of a community; Play Money, the vicissitudes of the market. The questions that concerned Dibbell in the earlier book are no longer at issue in the later one. Where My Tiny Life strives to convince the reader that virtual experience is emotionally and existentially real, Play Money takes this reality as a given. Instead, it strives to convince the reader that virtual labor, and virtual money and possessions, are economically real.
9. Another way to state the contrast between the two books is this. My Tiny Life turns almost entirely upon the separation, and indeed the competition, between VR and RL. At the end of the book, Dibbell quits LambdaMOO "because two lives were more than I could handle at the time" (304); his virtual life was real enough that it interfered with his actual, physical one. Play Money, in contrast, is about the inseparability of these two lives; they don't compete, but intertwine with one another. The life of the character on the computer screen is simply a part of the everyday life of the person sitting in front of the screen. And if Play Money ends, like My Tiny Life did, with the author's withdrawal from the virtual world he had spent so much time in, the reason for this withdrawal is entirely different. What Dibbell discovers on Ultima Online is the indistinguishability of play from work, of the virtual from the actual, and of his career as a "merchant of make- believe" (292) from his career as a freelance journalist. Rather than finding a magical world of possibility on Ultima Online, Dibbell is brought right back to the bottom line.
10. Specifically, Play Money is about Dibbell's experiences as a trader in virtual gold and virtual artifacts. People spend much of their time in Ultima Online, and other MMOs, searching for, making, buying and selling, or even stealing, such artifacts: things like houses to live in, furniture and decorations for these houses, fancy clothing, weapons and armor for fighting monsters (or other players), magical objects for casting spells, and things that have be- come collectibles simply because they are rare or unique in the gameworld. Having cool and beautiful stuff like this gives you in-game social prestige, as well as being aesthetically satisfying in itself. Often these artifacts can be made or found at the price of hard labor; in the virtual world, this means a lot of fairly mechanical pointing and clicking. Other times a greater degree of creativity is required: writing, or drawing, or programming, new objects and features that appear within the space of the game, and that have actual consequences for the players' experience and behavior. Within the game, all these artifacts can be bought and sold for virtual gold. And you can get virtual gold by mining it, or earn it by performing such tasks as killing monsters for a bounty.
11. But that is not all. Virtual objects can also be obtained outside the game. If you want a nice, well-located mansion in Ultima Online, but don't have the patience to spend 800 hours of game-playing time killing monsters in order to accumulate enough virtual gold to be able to afford it, you can take a shortcut, and buy such a mansion on eBay, with real U.S. money. MMOs have differing policies on the purchase and sale of virtual artifacts for hard cash. Everquest has banned this sort of trade, and tried (unsuccessfully) to suppress it; Second Life actively encourages it; while Ultima Online's policy is somewhere in between. Tracking the hard-cash trade in virtual goods, Dibbell discovers -- and himself becomes part of -- a strange under- world of merchants and grifters who make an actual living from commerce on MMOs. In Second Life especially, there are virtual artisans, who make and sell desirable virtual objects (clothing, motor vehicles, statues, or what- ever), or who accumulate wealth by buying, and then renting out, virtual real estate. In Ultima Online and other combat worlds, there are middlemen who buy and sell virtual artifacts on eBay and other sites, facilitating trades and pocketing the difference. And then there are the hackers and con men who accumulate virtual gold by exploiting bugs in the virtual world's programming, and by illicitly running bots to perform repetitive point-and-click operations. These scams never last for very long. Eventually the bugs are fixed and the bots are shut down. But the scammers just move on, discover another programming loophole, and start the process all over again.
12. Most amazingly, Dibbell discovers entrepreneurs who have set up "gaming factor[ies]" (292) -- or gold farms, as they have come to be called. These are offices in developing countries, like Mexico and especially China, where workers seated in front of computer monitors are paid to play MMOs eight to twelve hours a day, producing virtual artifacts or earning virtual gold. The work is boring, but probably not as onerous as having to labor in an actual factory. The entrepreneurs make their profit by pocketing the difference between the (real currency) wages they pay the workers, and the (real currency) money they get for selling the virtual artifacts and gold outside the game. Dibbell sees this as the ne plus ultra of postmodern dematerialization, the "relentless drift toward abstraction at every stage of the production process" foreseen by Marx (21). It's Baudrillard's hyperreality pushed to the point of "a sort of economic parody: offshore peons harvesting the bounty of a 'land' that exists nowhere and anywhere. Copyrighted bitmaps masquerading as iron ingots. Gold coins more ephemeral than any paper dollar" (22). Everything solid melts into air -- and is exported around the world as well. First manufacturing, and then services, were outsourced from the United States to the developing world. Now, globalization has reached the point where even game-playing can be outsourced.
13. Gold farms mark a new frontier in hyperreality, because the labor performed, and the products manufactured, are themselves entirely virtual. Of course, a certain amount of physical hardware is required: you need to rent office space, and buy a bunch of computers; and there has to be a communications infrastructure to bridge the distance between your office in Fuzhou, China and a bank of servers in Silicon Valley, California. But this is just the minimal background for a business predicated, as Dibbell puts it, on "the buying and selling of castles in the air" (23). Workers receive real (if meager) wages, guaranteeing them physical subsistence, in return for engaging in virtual play. This play, in turn, generates a stream of virtual profits. These profits are moved out of the gameworld, and inserted into the world economy, as Brittanian gold pieces are exchanged -- electronically, of course -- for a balance measured in U.S. dollars. Those dollars are then plowed back into the virtual production business, or otherwise invested in global financial flows.
14. Instead of the heterotopia of LambdaMOO, then, we would seem to have reached the libertarian-capitalist fantasy of a fully virtual economy, nicely defined by Dibbell as "a realm of atomless digital products traded in frictionless digital environments for paperless digital cash" (23). In such a world, everything is volatilized into bits, and your data is your life. The Invisible Hand of the market reigns supreme. The smooth space of virtual cash and virtual identities is entirely deregulated and tax-free. Dibbell worries a great deal about what will happen when the IRS finally "catch[es] up to reality" (313), grasps the actuality of virtual economic transactions; but it's doubtful whether many of the other players he meets are similarly scrupulous.
15. All this ought to remind us that capitalist production and accumulation have all along involved, and required, a certain mobilization of the virtual: a marshalling of signs, a designation of ownership rights, an abstraction of quantities of value. As Deleuze and Guattari (1983) put it, paraphrasing and extending Marx, the function of money is virtual or phantasmatic, since it involves "signs of the power of capital, flows of financing" that are never spent but continually reinvested, accumulating more and more value -- as long as the cycle of production and circulation is not broken (228). Cap- ital itself is a virtual fiction: a "consensual hallucination" (to use William Gibson's famous definition of cyberspace) that is enforced by law, and naturalized by habit and custom. It's a fiction, however, that has all-too-real effects and consequences -- often calamitous ones -- in whatever we still think of as the material world.
16. At this point, it makes little sense to think of MMOs as fantasy worlds, self- contained and sealed off from "real life." For there is a continual leakage from the virtual into the real (and vice versa), a blurring of the boundaries between the two. Doubtless, we must adopt a radical monism: MMOs are not virtual as opposed to real, but themselves parts of the One Real, with the same ontological consistency as schools, factories, markets, and weapons of mass destruction (all of which have both virtual and material aspects). I'd like to sharpen this claim, however, by suggesting that the "reality principle" of MMOs, the thing that makes them different from merely escapist fantasy worlds -- and also different from heterotopic places of refuge, passion, and experimentation -- is precisely their economic systems. Not only are virtual worlds tethered to the world economy, as Dibbell's narrative am- ply demonstrates. But also, internally, these worlds simulate -- which is to say, they present a simplified and idealized version of -- the actually existing "free market" capitalist economy."