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

Play Money explores the exceptional new phenomenon of MMORPGs, or Massively MultiPlayer Online Role-Playing Games, where 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 life. The desire to have 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 per annum and six figures a month. Play Money can be an extended walk on the weird side: a vivid snapshot of the subculture whose denizens were after 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 near future.