They do it by working for months to create a character in these fantasy worlds, assiduously building their faux-reality bona fides through hours upon hours of game play, until they’re specialized and accomplished, with high-level skills and hefty coffers filled with millions of gold pieces. Or they do it by selling imaginary iron ingots or virtual real estate on eBay for real American dollars. One man even farmed out the labor, paying Mexicans in Tijuana real money — more than they would have made tilling fields — to play Ultima Online for hours every day while he profited from their “work.”
Dibbell has been spelunking these parallel worlds since before many of us even heard of the Internet. His Village Voice essay “A Rape in Cyberspace,” written in 1993 and describing a text-based online world called LamdaMOO, was a seminal work in exploring virtual reality. But all this is amazing even to him. It all represents something entirely new, he writes, “the traditional economics of the intangible being stretched to the point of surreality.”
Dibbell created a character and got down to it. At first, his interest was merely reportorial. That changed quickly. “The real motor online is the incessant involvement of players in these games,” he says. “It’s just very hard to get close to them without getting sucked into the addictive treadmill of achievement and acquisition. And I did. There I was, hunting lizard men and really obsessively trying to raise my level and acquire a little gold here and there. And it just struck me that this is ridiculous. I’m spending all my time on this career, which is an imaginary one. I’ve gotta cut this out, cold turkey, or I’ve gotta make this part of my career.”
So he did that too. He found it wasn’t just that he could score 30,000 gold pieces for every thousand sheets he harvested of leathery lizard-man skin. And not just that those gold pieces could be traded up in the virtual bureau de change that is eBay for cold, hard American greenback. (At press time, 100 million gold pieces are being auctioned for $119 on the site.) What he found was that, while one red paper clip and the Million Dollar Homepage are “brilliant examples of the sort of one-off stunts that people can pull off to make money,” this is something more: “a solid, robust economy that is not going away.”
By the end of the year or so that he played Ultima Online “professionally,” he pulled down about $11,000. A paltry salary for most jobs to be sure. But not bad for a video game.
In a way, it’s not all that hard to believe that this sort of thing, a replacement — or at least a supplementation — of the Protestant work ethic with an economy of online play, could actually happen on a large scale. “Go back to Mesopotamia, the early days of human civilization,” Dibbell says. “The whole economy is about growing wheat and turning it into bread, and everything else is just sort of frills. Go to a peasant working on the field and say, ‘This is the center of your economic world, but see those guys over there learning how to write and scribble? Y’know, that looks really silly, but that’s gonna be the center of gravity in the economy in 10,000 years.’ Imagine how crazy that would have sounded? I don’t think it’s too much more ridiculous to say this game economy, once it’s developed its own momentum, could be as big as any sector out there.”
