THE SECOND LIFE OF JULIAN DIBBELL
An evening with Julian Dibbell, author of Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot, as interviewed through his avatar, "Julian Dibbell", in a conversation about MMOs and online worlds, gold farming and virtual sweatshops, the future of work when it becomes play, advising Linden Lab-- and sales of the Second Life edition of Play Money, which has earned Dibbell, as of last Friday, nearly $350 worth of Linden Dollars.
The lightly edited transcript of last Thursday's event after the break.
Julian Dibbell's appearance sponsored and produced by Millions of Us
Reuben Tapioca opens the show
I - BUT FIRST, A WORD-- AND CONTEST ANNOUNCEMENT-- FROM OUR SPONSOR
Reuben Tapioca, CEO, Millions of Us: Hello everyone, and welcome to the New Globe Theatre in Second Life. This is the first event we've held here since the fabulous Aimee Weber worked her magic and created it. To learn more about the real New Globe project, please visit www.newglobe.org...
We'd like to announce tonight that Millions of Us will be sponsoring a Play Competition ... One month from today, we'll throw open the curtain and have a night at the Theatre. There will be fabulous prizes. And we'll give away play money. [More details here - HA]
Now on with the show!
Hamlet Au: Way back in the days when online worlds were
described only by words, Julian Dibbell was the first journalist to explain
with words why online worlds mattered. His
1993 article for the Village Voice, "A Rape in Cyberspace", taught us
that true things were going on in these places that existed only as interactive
text and different private images in thousands of minds' eyes. Love and hate, crime and punishment, just for
starters. He also started teaching us about the new place the Internet was
taking us. And maybe a fair amount about
where we, as a species, will always be.
Way back before this world existed (except for a handful of brave Alpha testers) Julian Dibbell was one of the experts to share his wisdom with Linden Lab, and help them create the foundation which still underlies where we are today.
So it's a
great privilege to welcome Julian Dibbell to Second Life, not as an advisor on
high, but as just another content-creating resident with something to share. (And,
of course, sell.)
In this case, his latest book, Play Money, which tells
us what he learned about wealth, labor, and value-- and what they all really
mean to us.
[audience applauds]
III - THE INSPIRATION FOR PLAY MONEY
HA: So Julian, to begin: I think the book's title pretty much sums up the narrative: your adventure as a gold farmer in Ultima Online, and what you learned from the experience. But tell us what gave you the initial idea for Play Money.
Julian Dibbell: Um... desperation? Seriously, my fascination with virtual worlds predated the project considerably. So when I learned, through Ted Castronova's work largely, about virtual economies, it was a no brainer for me to dive right in and start writing about them.
But in the course of researching that article, I felt obliged to, um, sample the product. And thus was born a fairly burdensome addiction to Ultima Online. And at a certain point I realized: I've either got to quit cold turkey, or I've got to figure out a way to make my UO catassing productive.
Naturally I opted to try to salvage the catassing . And thus was born the project
"Play Money". Which begat the
blog "Play Money"
HA: Sorta Biblical in its lineage!
JD: Oh it's a very spiritual book, yes.
IV - HALF-RIGHT MARX AND THE FUTURE OF WORK
HA: This to me is one of the best lines from the book:
"Marx had it almost right. Solidity is not melting into air. Production is
melting into play."
Speak about that, as it relates to Play Money.
HA: Goferit!
JD: So: originally, I thought that what the main thing the book was going to
have to explain was the increasingly virtual nature of the world economy, and the material sort of seemed headed that
way. Since I start the book with the fascinating and almost allegorically
suggestive image of the
Because, I mean: here is this transnational microenterprise paying foreign workers to "harvest" completely unreal commodities in a networked space and so on, and it was just such a perfectly, parodically juicy image of contemporary global capitalism.
But then I realized: we all know what that phenomenon looks like,
how it works. What does it tell us to see it crystalized and miniaturized in
this surreal little image of the
And that's when I realized the key analytic term here wasn't going to be "virtuality" but "play". That is the element that's present in the Tijuana gold farm that hasn't been recongnized as crucial to understanding how capitalism is evolving right now.
[To the audience, grinning] Are you sick of this yet? Cuz I warned you.
HA: “It's a game!” (slap!) “It's a platform!” (slap!) “IT'S A GAME AND A PLATFORM!”
JA: ... but as an analytic move, it leaves us back in 1993, unable to really understand what's going on in Lambda MOO et. al. because we're so eager to establish that it's so much more than a game, before we grapple with the extent to which its "gameness" really matters, and then suddenly we're working at Xerox Parc trying to turn LambdaMOO into the future of the office space.
So... “/rantoff”.
HA: True. Let's move on before the question quagmires.
V - CONNECTING WITH THE GOLD FARMERS-- OR NOT
HA: The characters you meet in the gold
harvesting trade are pretty colorful in that geek-with-a-dream sort of way, but
I got a sense you had an emotional disconnect with most of them. You even
mention that at one point, but I didn't quite understand why.
JD: Hm. I do? [laughs]
HA: RADNY! [In Play Money, "Radny" is a very young, very
casual gold farmer who befriends Julian in UO. - HA]
JD: Well, see, Radny I connected to. He was
just playing the game.
And I guess part of me is attached to that "magic circle" fantasy that the play in worlds like UO can really be, separated out and protected from the productivity, but I do think it's a fanatasy. And I do think the crazy gold farmer types are more illuminating as characters, because what I learned from them is that it's really a game for a lot of them too. And so all up and down the economic food chain of these games from the lumpen teenboy players to the 39 year old server hacker, gold price- controlling farmers, the production and the play are hopelessly intertwined and mutually constitutive. If you follow.
VI - THE POLITICS OF GOLD FARMING: RED VERSUS BLUE?
HA: I think I do. One gold farmer you talked with made
the fascinating suggestion that players who were OK with gold farming tended to
be Republicans, while people who didn't tended to be Democrats. What's your
personal take on that view?
JD: My personal take is that it sounds right, for good reasons, but probably doesn't line up too tidily in fact. But yeah, on a sort of structural level, the
farmers are pro-market, doing what the market supports and their critics are
invoking social welfare as a value, sometimes inconsistent with and always
higher than market values themselves. And weirdly, though I'm pretty lefty in real life, I
end up thinking the anti-farmers are full of s*** more often than not.
HA: Have your views on the real world market and
government's role in it changed after this experiment, then?
JD: Oh, no not really. It's my views on virtual worlds and governance
that get knocked around more
HA: How so?
VII - DEBATING THE VALUE OF VIRTUAL WORLD WORK
HA: Having been in Second Life for so long, one thing
that kept nagging me about Play Money, I have to say, is how futile it
seemed. All this work and ingenuity wasted on gold harvesting, which they could
have used to make money creating genuinely valuable content in SL!
[guffaws and coughs from the audience]
JD [laughs] : give me a moment to think of a
polite answer to that.
HA: No need to be polite!
JD: Well jeez. I mean. The game in UO is
leveling. The game in SL is building, or whatever social advancement that
attains. The gold farmers are both
playing the local game and serving others who want to play that game. The builders here, ditto.
JD: I'm all for creativity in the sense you mean. I've really loved this whole [SL book appearance] project and been amazed by what's been produced for it... Of course I see the futility you're talking about. I talk about that in the very first chapter.
But: it seemed futile relative to a "real" job, not relative to SL, where I suppose it might take a little longer for that sense of futility to kick in, but where it would surely do so, at least for me, unless I did something like the Play Money project, or like what the gold farmers do.
I'm also
leery of a kind of self-satisfied artistic elitism that could easily set in a
place like SL.
JD [laughs]: Yeah, maybe it's the suit, Hamlet.
VIII - ADVISING LINDEN LAB IN THE EARLY DAYS OF SECOND LIFE
HD: Speaking of which... In Play Money you talk a
little bit about being an advisor for Linden Lab, in the early days. What did
you tell them? Are you seeing anything in Second Life that seems to reflect
your wisdom?
That said... I think I would have said what Lessig was saying, had it been left up to me: keep it open. Recognize that you're running a society, and recognize that democracy is not just an ideal, it's an almost essentially economic solution to the difficulties of governing a truly complex society. Democracy is a good business model, in other words. And yeah, I think they liked hearing that, and I think it encouraged them in some of the directions they've gone since.
[Grins, nods at Urizenus Sklar, former editor of the SL Herald, sitting in the audience]
The hovering presence of Skar (in robe)
Though Uri here might have some dissenting views about the Lindens' relationship to democracy. But as for my ideas about the centrality of play and games to what goes on in virtual worlds, what makes them matter, I think that despite their overt insistence on distancing themselves from the game rubric... they've done a lot of the right things in that regard. Getting the economy right, for instance, requires a pretty ludic, game-like sensibility, and having a working economy promotes a more game-like involvement in the space than you had in places like The Palace or even, say, LambdaMOO.
IX - THE DIBBELL TAKE ON GOLD FARMING
HA: Now that you have your author's hat off and have
some perspective of distance, what's your own view of gold farming? Is it
something game developers should stop, or leverage?
JD: Neither. They maybe could slow it down,
and maybe should. But they can't effectively leverage it. I don't think the best
they can do is what LL is doing with the [currency] exchange, and Sony with the RMT-friendly Everquest servers: get a little slice of the volume of player-to-player
transactions.
X - THE PERSONAL COST OF GOLD FARMING
HA: This is a tough question to ask, but there's a
passage in the book where you mention a serious break in your family life
during your gold trading experiment. Do
you still believe it had nothing to with being so immersed in the game? I have
to say, I wasn't totally convinced by your disavowal.
JD: I think maybe you weren't convinced only
because making a convincing argument would have required airing personal stuff
that, I learned with my first book, really doesn't need to be published. I know it wasn't the gaming, but i'm afraid you'll
have to take my word for it.
HA: Fair enough!
JD: That said, I do subscribe to the
EverQuest Widows mailing list, which gets pretty ugly sometimes. So I know it's
not a non-issue in general.
XI - IMPROMPTU POSTSCRIPT ON THE POST-PLAY MONEY STATE OF MMOs
HA: The bulk of the book closes out in mid-2004, and a lot has changed in the world of MMOs, since then, and maybe your perspective has changed some, too. What would you have liked to include in this book, after it went to print?
JD [laughs]: Well, I wrote the last words of it in April of this year, and they were pretty much torn from my hands and sent
straight to the printer, so I did have a chance to look around and consider
what needed to be updated.
HA: That's like three extra books right there.
JD: Well, yes and no. In a way, because WoW is such a conservative
design, there's not a whole lot that would distinguish that story from Ultima Online's and
the story I developed there. But my own
experience with WoW has been around this growing phenomenon of "WoW is the new
golf," as Joi Ito puts it.
Jeff Wakawaka [from the audience]: Golf with dancing nekkid night elves.
JD: WoW as the first MMO that's becoming a
key cultural referent and distributed networking space for grownups,
professionals, people whose investment of social capital in these spaces
therefore becomes very substantial.
HA: Yeah. And I think there'll be a convergence [between the two groups] soon,
too.
XII - ONLINE WORLDS AND ACADEMIA
HA: The first question comes from Rik Riel, who had to book, so I'll ask
for him: “Do you think that the academy
is going to increasingly recognize MMORPGs as a legitimate subject of research
inquiry? Similar to porn in the 90s?"
JD [laughs]: I'll say "Yes" to the first part of the
question, beg off the second one. Yeah
definitely the academy is taking it more seriously, though it's not quite like
that. There was an early wave of academic virtual reality hype in the early 90s, remember,
very lit and theory-centric.
HA: It was so theoretical it disappeared up its virtual
butt.
JD: But it was always done in a sort of
theoretically imperialist way, to borrow a term from ludologist Jesper Juul. You know, my discipline-- film studies,
literature, psychology-- will now march forth and plant its flag in the virgin
soil of virtual worlds!
HA: Ha!
JD: And that's a shallow engagement, because it's alla 'bout assimilating virtual worlds to the motherfield. Whereas the new generation, a lot of the people around Terra Nova and in my World of Warcraft guild, are more interdisciplinary, more ludocentric, more gamer than the first generation. So I think it's more a matter of gamers starting to infiltrate academia than of academia waking up and taking us seriously. But intellectual change is ever thus, saith Thomas Kuhn.
XIII - FINDING THE COLORFUL CHARACTERS OF PLAY MONEY
HA: OK, next question comes from Cyrus Huffhines--
Cyrus?
Cyrus Huffhines [from the audience]: My question deals with narrative and a
storyline at the beginning, the provenance of the tower [in Ultima Online]. Its ownership moves
from
CH: No no, that the characters were so damn
interesting. A construction worker, a truck driver. And I am curious how much of this was good
fortune, or was it like a documentary, where you pick threads from a huge
amount of content that you have delved into? In other words, how many stories
did you explore before you decided on that one? Or was it just there and
perfect from the outset?
JD [laughs]: Oh hehe. no, the first, of course. A lot
of sorting. Starting with, the [story]
with Black Snow fell through, so then I had to regroup. And my strategy then
was: ask Bob Kiblinger, the guy in West Virginia,
to give me a list of recent customers willing to talk to me...
CH: Right, OK. Because it's almost like an Altman movie, and
it was very visual, watching the narrative float from place to place.
JD: ... then pick the most interesting ones,
and ask him to find the sellers he got the commodities from, and see which of
those were wiling to talk, and interesting. The fact of getting a construction worker and a truck driver was
fortuitous. But there were a lot of interesting people to pick from.
I'm especially sorry I couldn't work in the woman who
played with her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother, because it was just about up to
mom's cognitive speed.
JD: A great idea, Cyrus. I'm actually wishing I could do a Wiki for the book, with outtakes, errata, bibliographic notes, etc., but feeling a bit daunted about setting it up. So um, anyone likes to do that kind of compulsively, please allow me to indulge your compulsion!
XIV - THE FUTURE OF PLAY ECONOMY
HA: OK,
Neptune Rebel had a question but also had to run, so I ask for her: “Here's my question: Do you see a 'play
economy' eventually becoming the primary style of business worldwide?"
JD: Great question! Because on the face of
it, it's absurd, right?
But if you had gone to Babylonia or whenever 10,000 years ago, and said "Hey, 10,000 years from now, the economy you think of as the economy, the growing of grain and baking it and distributing it and all that stuff, and the system you think of as sort of spiritual and ephemeral, the priestly stuff of knowledge work, those roles are going to be completely flipped around, with esoteric, highly mediated financial transactions constituting BY FAR the majority of economic activity on the globe..." they would have laughed at you. Or made you their rain god.
And the evolution of a play economy would work very similarly, with the economy itself creating its own needs, which feed on themselves with especial voracity and velocity because there's less and less physical stuff involved to slow it down. Until voila, yeah, we still need agricultural workers and accountants and systems analysts and so forth, but of course all the REAL wealth of the world is being made here in these little worlds that used to be dismissed as mere games.
That being, I mean, some future endpoint this all is headed toward, not the current situation.
XV - AVATAR SEX PLAY AS GOLD FARMING
HA: Pixeleen Mistral, you had a question?
Pixeleen Mistral [from the audience]: Do you plan to start gold farming here?
Along with Hamlet? In case the book thing doesn’t work out?
JD [laughs]: Is that done here?
HA: Not to my knowledge. What do you mean, Pix?
PM: In role playing, yes. Like you know... cyber for hire?
JD: Wow.
HA: Does that count as farming? Sexing up folks?
Jeff Wakawaka [from the audience]: Hmm... I'd pay to cyber with a published
author.
PM: It harvests Linden Dollars.
JD: OK then. [grins] No. Although the whole [virtual] book sales thing already seems enough of a scam for me.
HA: Julian, you're a handsome bastard, you're missing an opportunity here.
moo Money [from the audience]: Hamlet was telling us how good looking you
were.
Dear Leader [from the audience]: What plays in SL, stays in SL.
JD [to Pixeleen]: I’m not seeing the distinction
between the book sales and the other activities you mentioned. Can you
elaborate?
PM: Well, which pays better? And which is
more fun?
JD: Well to me, selling a book I already
wrote that has my name on it is more fun, and therefore probably more
lucrative, than cyber-whoring, but that's just a personal preference. I'm not
sure I could objectively distinguish them. As economic activities, I mean.
HA: You could write a sequel where you try it out: Foreplay Money.
HA: Dear Leader (hopefully not Kim Jung Il online) has a
question. Dear?
JD: I would pay for cyber with Kim Jung Il.
Dear Leader: [W]hat essentially is your critique of
global capitalism in a nutshell if it gave you $11,000 in a game?
JD: [D]o you mean, why am I complaining about
the system if the system helps pay my mortgage?
DL: Well, that too. I wonder what your take is on the "land model" of an economy, and how that tracks to real life global capitalism. The problem that you lefties always cite of how
capitalism has to keep sucking up resources and grow bigger and bigger to
profit. IF that is the critique. I mean, could a game built on the premise of
communes and hippies and cooperatives be fun? Bet it would be as dull as granola.
JD: Well, I'm not sure I see a functional
difference between a land model of virtual reality capitalism and any others-- the very
essence of these VR economies is that the only significant variable is how much
scarcity is applied to the various objects in the economy.
DL: It's not scarce, virtual land, they can keep
endlessly rolling it out. But it is expensive when doled out.
JD: Whether you call those objects land or
clothes or widgets is sort of arbitrary, but no-- Second Commune Life would
not be a fun game. That is the basic problem. So while the scarcity of land is imposed at
will by Linden Lab, Linden Lab is in turn constrained by a requirement to keep it fun. And
fun disappears once they open the floodgates.
Chris Lake [from the audience]: Land is the one scarce resource, so yes, there is money to be made there. But it toally misses the point here that one TRUE scarce resource we have in SL is TALENT! And that's where money is to be made. Creativity.
JD: No, again, fun is also a truly scarce
commodity. The
XVII - CAN ONLINE WORLD COMMERCIALISM AND ONLINE WORLD ESCAPISM CO-EXIST?
HA: Krisjohn Twin had a question-- Kris?
KT: How do you address a player or virtual
citizen's desire to escape the very aspects of our capitalist society that
heavy commericalization of virtual spaces import into the game? Is it time for
people interested in abstracted challenges removed from the real world to move
on to something new, or do you believe the casual gamer and full-time
virtual-worker can co-exist in a place like WoW?
JD: Well, I believe that they do co-exist in WoW. I think the gold farmers are genuinely annoying to a certain extent, but that the discourse of hatred and fury and impatience with them is fueled more by people trying to figure out and shore up their notions of what the game means to them, and I think anyone who ever went into one of these places thinking they could truly escape realtiy, economic and otherwise, has bigger problems to grapple with than Chinese gold farmers camping their favorite Furbolg village.
KT: So, you think any social space is fair
game for people who want to make money?
JD: These are great questions, though, that people in virtual world studies are constantly hashing and rehashing. Open game? No, obviously not. I Just think the nature of these games is that they were never so innocent to begin with. They're built around the leveling treadmill, for starters. What is so utopian about that? And once that's there, the snake is in the garden.
HA: GreeterDan Godel had a question-- Dan?
Journalist Godel bursts the reality wall
GreeterDan Godel [from the audience]: Hey, Julian, Daniel Terdiman here.
HA: Dan writes for News.com.
JD: Oh hey! Stop damaging the immersive
fantasy!
GG: [laughs] So...how long it wil be before
we see people widely accepting L$ or other virtual currencies for products and
services entirely unrelated to their corresponding games? I mean...I'm thinking of an Ebay auction for, I dunno, a flyfishing rod where the seller says he accepts Paypal and Linden Dollars.
JD: It's an interesting question, but a very
mushy one, because what exactly do you mean by widely?
GG: I mean, you made me think of this by
selling your book for Linden Dollars.
JD: So yeah, already with this book we've
sold about 40 copies in three days, including maybe a dozen print copies, so do we
only count the print copies? Or... WTF?
GG: I think you have to account for them differently, yeah.
JD: OK, right. so let's count them separately. fine. But why? The sold item with the print book is not the paper and cardboard, it's the words, which exist equally in both versions.
And a virtual book like this has a much less integral relationship to the space of SL than an uber weapon does to the space of WoW. So I think the book example is very liminal and weird and interesting for that reason, but also less decisive for that reason.
Anyway. Look at slexchange.com-- have you, Dan? Cuz you should.
HA: We're still waiting for a solid example of SL-to-RL
commerce. The book and the graphic card from Flipper, uh, probably a few [other instances] here
and there, but nothing big.
JD: I was just checking it out and wondering
why, once you have an entire auction site set up to take both L$ and US$, you
only sell Second Life items there?
GG: Exactly.
JD: OK, so next I need to look at SL
Boutique. My point is there's nothing
stopping it from happening, it already is happening, and "widely" or not is
kind of a vague thing to nail down.
XIX - WHEN WILL REAL COMPANIES LEARN TO PLAY?
Reuben Tapioca [from the audience]: Julian, you've obviously thought a lot
about the relationship
JD: [M]y answer is framed first of all, that I think open-source software is really the first major example of a production system driven by ludic energy. 'Ludergy' I think was the term me and Howard Rheingold settled after too much coffee at a conference. So I think to the extent that corporations like IBM et. al. are trying to catch that train, they are already sort of doing what you're talking about-- looking toward more game-like models of production.
RT: I guess I mean that companies with "bad" products that don't sell well spend a lot of time thinking and trying to fix them, and maybe they should look at them as games-- that aren't much fun to play, that's all.
JD: Well sure, they should definitely be
trying that, why not?
Signing copies
XX - POST-INTERVIEW INTERVIEW
The day after the book signing, after Julian Dibbell had returned to the real life leg of his book promotion tour, I e-mailed him to get his reflections on the experience:
"[I]t's amazing how much actual
food for thought a person can get into an interview when he doesn't have to spend most of it explaining what virtual worlds are and why
anyone should take them seriously. So that's the main difference, I
would say, between Thursday's event and the typical book promotions
I've done: the abundant cluefulness of both interviewer and audience.
"And then there was just the usual mind-warping surrealism of it all.
At first I couldn't really pay attention to anything but the grueling
job of typing through the lag, of course, but then [Millions of Us producer] Green Fate
whispered me to swing my camera around so it was just you and me in
the shot, and that pretty much killed the lag.
"So then I could both type and watch, and lo, what I am watching is: you and me sprawled out on those amazing chairs scripted to make us look just like a couple of French intellectuals doing a Sunday morning state-funded TV talk show, complete with bored-looking fidgets and vaguely disdainful gazes. And our avatars both sculpted just close enough to our real life appearances to land them right in the bottom of the uncanny valley. And those giant copies of Play Money stacked up on stage behind us. It was all just a very strange scene."
I asked him about the sales of the virtual edition of Play Money, going for L$750 (about $2.25) or both SL and RL versions for L$6250 (about $18.75).
"As of this morning [last Friday] we have sold 64 copies of the virtual book. And 12 of these orders included purchases of the print version. So: not bad for one week of sales, no?" Not bad at all: almost $350 worth of Linden Dollars.
What about the prospect of virtual editions and booksignings as a regular promotion and selling channel, for authors?
"Looking at the long range, though, I dunno. Falk [Bergman, the SL publisher] has done an amazing job with the book objects -- they are beautiful and really surprisingly readable. But we'll have to do some market research, I guess, before we can say how many people are buying with the intent of actually reading the thing onscreen. Maybe Falk has some hard data from his earlier releases.
"Or maybe you could toss the question into your write-up as an invitation to reader-response?"
Consider that done.
Great transcript, thanks for posting this, Ham. And asking my question. Sorry I couldn't have stayed for the whole thing.
As to Julian's question, I bought the virtual and the dead trees version of the book, but only plan on reading the actual physical book. Reading over the shoulder of my avatar just sounds kinda pointless.
Posted by: rikomatic | Monday, July 31, 2006 at 07:36 AM
Nice work Hamlet. This was a really special event and one that I'd really like to repeat.
Posted by: reuben steiger | Monday, July 31, 2006 at 08:38 AM
Glorious stuff, and a beautiful use of the new globe. Many thanks to James, Reuben, Falk, & Julian!
Posted by: Brandon Pr | Monday, July 31, 2006 at 10:55 AM