I vividly remember how fascinated I was by Julian Dibbell‘s book “Play Money: or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot” (2006). The subject was gold farming, a practice described by Wikipedia as such:
In the 1990s and 2000s, gold farming was the practice of playing a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) to acquire in-game currency later selling it for real-world money. People in several developing nations have held full-time employment as gold farmers.
The existence of RMT or real-money trading made it possible for the economist Edward Castronova to estimate in 2001 that the Gross National Product per capita in some of these games was at the time somewhere in between that of Russia and Bulgaria, higher than that of China and India.
In the latest edition of Wired’s podcast Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Julian Dibbell and gaming professional and media personality Marcus Eikenberry are interviewed about the history of gold farming. The episode also gives some insights in how the industry changed (lots of tracking and data analytics), pushing people like Eikenberry into new ventures such as training for streaming esports on YouTube.
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