Play Money

"This is where it gets really interesting in the present day. If we want to talk about the biggest problems and challenges around games, too, economics seems to me a much more fertile ground for worry and exploration than the vague fears of corruption that are doing the rounds. Play Money was written by an American author called Julian Dibbell, who decided he was going to spend a year trying to earn enough money to live off purely by trading in virtual goods. Virtual goods are things that only exist within a game world, but which people value so much that they are prepared to pay real world money for. It sounds uncanny and paradoxical, but makes perfect sense: game worlds exist to reward people, you have to put in a lot of effort to get stuff within them, and a lot of people wish to short-cut that effort. It’s simple supply and demand. There is a demand among millions of fairly affluent players for virtual things that take hundreds or thousands of hours to earn, and so the supply exists to meet this demand, especially in places like China, where the national average wage is not very high. At this point, virtual economics start to look astonishingly real. It’s possible to construct, out of nothing, a virtual arena that generates enormous notions of value from its players. It begins to blur the boundaries between what is playful and recreational and what is hard work, what is business. This, I think, is one of the reasons that games are a fascinating window into the world’s future, because the ways in which we are recreating and entertaining ourselves, and the activities that we think of as business and money, are blurring in some ways. After all, it’s easier to trace the chain of value of spending 100 hours of effort earning a virtual sword that then has a monetary value put on it by the market than it is to understand why it is a derivative is worth a certain amount of money. If you want to talk about the potential of game worlds, this is hugely important. Economics has never been such a precisely measurable science before – these may be games, but they are also very real and very valuable economies, with real world economic phenomena appearing in them. Unlike real life, however, you can measure every single variable precisely down to the tiniest millimetre, and you can easily set up controls, comparisons, you can tweak variables. Down the line, this could have very wide applications."