MMORPG gold farmer-turned-author interviewed by NPR

Fresh Air (no “jazz hands” this week: it was a guest host, alas) interviewed a former Ultima Online gold farmer who turned his experiences into a book about the whole selling virtual goods for real life currency industry thingy:

Journalist Julian Dibbell talks about his book Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot. He explores the world of online role-playing games, where hundreds of thousands of players log on to operate fantasy characters in virtual environments. One of the most popular games, World of Warcraft, has six million subscribers.

(As of this week, WoW is actually at 7.5 million, but why quibble?)

NPR has a lot of folks who apparently haven’t played a videogame since Pac-Man so they’re always flabbergasted at the very notion of MMORPGs and the subculture that surrounds them, so there’s a story like this every year or so.

The amazement of the interviewer — with its implicit message of “all you 10.5 million people are nuts” — was a little tiresome, but it’s otherwise a very good interview.

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