Selling junk from around the house on eBay is fun, but driving to the post office is kind of a drag. When I saw Julian Dibbell's Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot, I thought I might be onto something I'd enjoy. For one thing, when my daughter got sick of Neopets, I took over her account, and I'm glad to report that our oldest pet, Jenifrlopez, is now 1,298 days old. (My daughter's gotten into Runescape: she's the girl with a chef's cap who goes around butchering virtual zoo animals.) Right now on eBay, someone is trying to sell a Runescape virtual Santa Hat for $100. Some virtual items have sold for hundreds of real dollars, presumably to game players who don't want to spend the hours it can take to earn rare items.
There is no market for virtual Neopets stuff on eBay, and my daughter refuses to sell her Runescape items. Neopets is not exactly a MMORPG ("massively multiplayer online role-playing game), and Runescape is not one of the more popular ones. Check the MMORPG Web site or similar ones for an update.
I read the somewhat similar book Fake: Forgery, Lies, and eBay in one long sitting; Play Money took about a week in short stretches. It would help to have a background in economics to understand how virtual worlds are similar to and different from the real one.
I'm not going to say how Julian Dibbell's 50-hour stretches of game playing worked out. But this is not exactly a get-rich-quick book, and at one point I almost started crying. I also found parts of the book very funny: the writer's conversations with the accountant and the IRS representative, for example, where he attempts to explain his business and find out if his virtual items are taxable. Obviously they are when he makes actual money on eBay—but what if he decides not to sell them in the real world? Do they still have value? He's rather hurt when the IRS suggests that they probably don't. You can learn more at his personal Web site.
I'm also not going to say whether MMORPG entrepreneurs really have hired laborers in third-world countries to play online games twenty-four hours a day in order to earn virtual items that the bosses can then sell on eBay.
Economist Edward Castronova has written another book on the subject, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, which manages to be both scholarly (you have to become comfortable with equations like P = MV / Q) and lively. Castronova says he had to play online multiplayer games for "several hundred hours" before even understanding what was going on, so in terms of time, selling virtual items for real money may not be the best scamming choice for a new game player.
As an aside, Ken Walton, the author of Fake, mentioned my blog on his book in his blog. Scroll down to the January 3 entry. How cool is that?
Also, if you're kind of getting tired of Neopets, please feel free to offload your neopoints and items to me at 1becky4u. I promise not to send you money, which could cause your family tax problems later.
PS Right now, there are 224,853 people online playing Runescape.