Overview

Play Money explores a remarkable new phenomenon that's just beginning to enter public consciousness: MMPORGs, or Massively MultiPlayer Online Role-Playing Games, in which hundreds of thousands of players operate fantasy characters in virtual environments the size of continents. With city-sized populations of nearly full-time players, these games generate their own cultures, governments, and social systems and, inevitably, their own economies, which spill over into the real world. The desire for 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 a year and six figures a month. Play Money is an extended walk on the weird side: a vivid snapshot of a subculture whose denizens were once the stuff of mere sociological spectacle but now, with computer gaming poised to eclipse all other entertainments in dollar volume, and with the lines between play and work, virtual and real increasingly blurred, look more and more like the future.

Full Product Details

9798200562138

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Coming soon... Grover Gardner has recorded more than 650 audiobooks since beginning his career in 1981. He's been named one of the Best Voices of the Century as well as a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine. Gardner has garnered over 20 AudioFile Earphones Awards and is the recipient of an Audio Publishers Association Audie Award, as well as a three-time finalist. In 2005, Publishers Weekly deemed him Audiobook Narrator of the Year. Gardner has also narrated hundreds of audiobooks under the names Tom Parker and Alexander Adams. Among his many titles are Marcus Sakey's At the City's Edge, as well as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and John Irving's The Cider House Rules. Gardner studied Theater and Art History at Rollins College and received a Master's degree in Acting from George Washington University. He lives in Oregon with his significant other and daughter.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available