1 post tagged “book”

Just finishing up Julian Dibbell's second book, "Play Money," about the brave new not-world of MMORPGs, and specifically about his adventures trying to make a buck off of Ultima Online (UO).  The book, which I mostly enjoyed, is both an exploration of the relationship between play and work (hint: they're the same thing, which is making work a lot more fun and play a lot less) and real economies versus virtual ones (hint: they're all virtual, but at least the games are honest about it), as well as a memoir of his semi-addiction to the game over the course of a year and the impact that has on his life.

On the whole, the book works much better when Dibbell is focused on the higher implications of his situation rather than the specific details of his own life in the game, which, fortunately, is for most of it.  He sets up a challenge for himself at the beginning of the book, nominally framing the whole tale, that, through the buying and selling of virtual goods from UO on eBay and elsewhere, he will make more money in a year than he has ever made working as a writer.  It's a helpful device at first, but breaks down towards the end when he pushes the more analytic aspects of the story aside to focus entirely on whether or not he's going to meet his goal (hint: he doesn't.) 

The thrust of that narrative would have been much stronger if Dibbell had realized that he was working with a macguffin -- the rest of us were reading the book for reasons that had nothing to do with whether or not he failed or succeeded, really.  Doesn't help that he was separating from his wife at the same time he was rushing to meet his goal, which is sad and painful to read about but fails to advance the subject at hand at all, especially since he goes out of his way to assure us that UO had nothing to do with the end of his marriage.  But, speaking as someone who also often fails to make the distinction between personal feeling and professional narrative, it's hard to fully fault the guy for mixing up the two.  And he pretty much makes up for it in the last few chapters, which get back to the meat of his arguments.

What else?  The short section on what to do about current US tax laws is mind bendy in its implications but doesn't go much of anywhere.  The parts where he's analyzing the issues involving the relationship between play and work are far and away the best -- Flickr/Ludicorp dealt explicitly with a lot of the same issues, and Caterina deftly pulled out one of the best quotes from the book in a recent post.

Also, Ender's Game and Snow Crash both show up, of course, but, mercifully, only briefly.  And there's a great bit where he hires a guild elf as his accountant.  Gotta love that.