Exploring the Online Gaming World

DATE November 15, 2006 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards talks
about a new book he edited called "Home: The Blueprints of Our
Lives," politics and whether he'll run for presidency in 2008
DAVE DAVIES, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave DAVIES, senior writer for the Philadelphia News,
filling in for Terry Gross.

One of the potential presidential candidates for 2008 who hasn't gotten much
attention lately is the Democrat's vice-presidential nominee from 2004, John
Edwards. Edwards decided not to run for re-election to the Senate that year,
and he now runs an anti-poverty think tank at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, but he's stayed active politically, raising money and
campaigning for other Democratic candidates, and he's made several trips to
Iowa, ground zero for the next presidential race. Edwards' wife, Elizabeth,
was diagnosed with breast cancer in the closing days of the 2004 campaign, but
her husband reports she's now cancer-free. She's written a memoir called
"Saving Graces," and John Edwards has edited a collection of essays by a
variety of Americans, some well-known, about their childhood homes. It's
called "Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives." I spoke to John Edwards
yesterday.

You know, as I thought about the theme of this book "Home" and your life, one
of the things that occurred to me is that no matter where you're from, no
place could be farther from home, in some ways, than Washington, DC. I mean,
you were from North Carolina, were elected to the Senate, I guess in 1998,
moved your family there, and I know that since you chose not to run for
re-election, you and your family sold your house in Washington and moved back
to North Carolina last year. And I'm wondering, you know, what it does to
live in Washington, a city that is so suffused with cynicism and ambition.
What that--does that change you? Does it affect the way you and your family
live?

Mr. JOHN EDWARDS: It certainly has the potential to change people, there's
no doubt about that, and there's no doubt it has changed some people. And I
will be the first to admit--I mean, I now live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina,
on 100 acres of land, outside the town, amidst a bunch of farms, and I love it
there. Man, do I love it there! And I like it a lot better than I liked
living in Washington. But I think at the end of the day, home is whatever
city it's in, home is the environment in which you and your children and your
family exist, and that's really, at least for us, it's--you're right about
everything you've said about Washington, but within our own house and our own
home, it's really very much the same as it was when we lived in North Carolina
originally, then in Washington, and I might add, I've gotten this terrible
habit from doing so much national campaigning, both for the ticket in 2004 and
then in the most recent election, which we'll probably talk about. I did a
lot of traveling. I campaigned for virtually every contested race in the
country. And I've gotten in this bad habit now at the end of the day when I'm
going to my hotel room saying, `Boy it's good to get home.' This is not a
healthy thing for my children who were doing the same thing during the
campaign, so I've, unfortunately, trained them to think the same way.

DAVIES: Home is some place that has grass.

Mr. EDWARDS: Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

DAVIES: Well, John Edwards, I wanted to talk some about the experience of
2004--I mean, what a year in your life, and I note that late in the
presidential campaign your wife Elizabeth was diagnosed with breast cancer,
and I certainly hope she's doing well. Your wife, Elizabeth, writes in her
book--she has a couple of chapters on the experience of the campaign--and
recalls at some point she realized that at her events, they were only allowing
the faithful into the Democrats, and she insisted that everything be open to
the public and, I think, had T-shirts printed saying "Open to the public"
because she thought it was so critical to engage people who thought
differently.

Mr. EDWARDS: And not only that, I had events where we did the same thing
that Elizabeth's talking about. And someone--I'd always take a lot of
questions in these town-hall meetings and someone would stand up with a
position that was contrary to the standard Democratic position or was contrary
to the position of most of the people in the hall, and it's such--you know,
it's a partisan campaign so people would start booing or asking them--and you
have to--you're in charge, you're the leader, and you have to say--I remember
one example vividly of me having to say, `No, let this young'--it was a young
man--`let this young man talk. He deserves to be heard. I want to respond to
what he's concerned about, what he's worried about.' But that's an example of
you have to really make an effort because if I just let that run its natural
course, he would have basically been shouted down.

DAVIES: Did you insist on inviting the public to all your events?

Mr. EDWARDS: I know that there came a point that we invited--I think,
actually, all of my events as a vice-presidential candidate, all the big
public events were open to everybody. We did some smaller events, like on
porches and so forth that were controlled, but the vast majority of the events
were just open to anybody who wanted to come.

DAVIES: You know, the other thing about living in a Washington environment in
a bubble is the way you see politicians become so relentlessly on message and
cautious and unwilling to be candid, and I'm sure this is abetted by a 24-hour
news cycle and cable TV station and an opposition research organization that
is ready to pounce on everything. Did you find yourself becoming more and
more circumscribed?

Mr. EDWARDS: I'll tell you, I think you have just put your finger on one of
the single largest problems in American politics. What happens with
politicians, and it's not like I haven't experienced it myself, I have, is
that you're conditioned not to be yourself. You're conditioned to say the
same thing over and over and over because that's the safe route. If you watch
people go outside that, they get in trouble. But the truth of the matter is
that what that does is it feeds the cynicism--it feeds the cynicism that
people have about politicians, and it also feeds the toxicity that exists in
American politics today, which is extraordinarily unhealthy. But,
unfortunately, it's married to the perception of a lot of politicians that
pabulum is what you should be giving the public, you know, that somehow they
can't take the truth. You can't just tell them the truth and tell them when
you disagree with them, tell them what you think is the right thing to do for
the country.

I think the result of all that is that we need to really change the way
politics is conducted in America. We do. We need a leader or leaders who are
willing to be themselves, who'll tell the truth as they see it. Sometimes it
will be popular, sometimes it will be less popular, and will stand up, as you
point out, for what their convictions are, what is it they actually believe,
and I think somebody, anybody who were to do that, would stand out like a neon
light.

DAVIES: I want to go over one moment in the campaign that generated some
controversy, and that was during the vice-presidential debate where you took
on Dick Cheney, where the question came up about the Republicans' position on
gay marriage, and you mentioned--you praised the vice president for his
understanding of his lesbian daughter, Mary Cheney's lifestyle and, you know,
embracing her choice, embracing her decision. And, of course, this generated
enormous controversy because it was seen by some as your finding a way to
bring up something that social conservatives would not like to hear about the
opposition ticket. I'm wondering, did you talk about bringing that up before
the debate?

Mr. EDWARDS: No, what happened was--no one remembers this--but what happened
was, in the context of both the question and the campaign, a few weeks before
our debate, Dick Cheney himself had brought up out on the campaign trail the
issue of gay marriage and talked about his daughter and what their family had
been through and how it's important for them to embrace her, and he talked
about it at some length, and then I was aware of that. And then, during the
debate, no one again remembers this, but the first question wasn't to me on
this issue, it was to the vice president and the question was to Dick Cheney,
you know, a question that put it--a question about gay marriage was in the
context of his family basically, and he answered the question and when it came
to me, I thought it was appropriate to point out that what he was doing in his
personal life was something that most Americans, I believe, would applaud.
It's impossible for me to imagine that as being a negative thing. I didn't
even think about it being a negative thing. It was one of the few
nonacrimonious moments in a very bitter, tough debate because he and I
disagree about virtually everything. But that was a moment where that wasn't
true and then to contrast what he was saying with the position that an
ideological administration, the Bush administration, was taking, and that was
my point, was that they were being hypocritical and he was doing the right
thing within his own family. But he had brought this up himself and it was in
the question that went to him, so--and by the way, no one remembers this
either, he thanked me for what I said. As I said, it was one of the few times
that we...

DAVIES: Well, maybe...

Mr. EDWARDS: ...had actually had a very civil discussion.

DAVIES: Maybe at the time, but he and others and Mary Cheney criticized you
harshly for it later.

Mr. EDWARDS: Yes, that happened though after--no one did at the time and
then...

DAVIES: So it was part of the political process later, you're
saying...(unintelligible).

Mr. EDWARDS: It was, and it really came, if you remember, after Senator
Kerry in a later debate brought the issue up...

DAVIES: Right.

Mr. EDWARDS: ...and I think it sort of rankled some people.

DAVIES: But, you know, it strikes me as sort of the archetypical illustration
of this dilemma in politics because here we see John Edwards do this in a
debate, and on the one hand, we say, `Look, isn't this great, the guy is
reaching across this partisan divide and making a human connection.' On the
other hand, if we take it a deeper level, we could attribute a cynical motive,
because maybe he scores a political point by doing so, and since in the vortex
of a campaign, the cynical interpretation will get a lot of ink. Aren't you
pressured then to kind of think cynically at the outset?

Mr. EDWARDS: It is--this whole discussion that you and I just had is a
wonderful example of the toxicity of American politics. I mean, the fact that
I can't say what I'm actually thinking at the time and the way everything will
get taken and twisted and turned and done over and over, over on right-wing
radio and Rush Limbaugh and all that stuff, it's not--listen. We ought to
have--we ought to have vigorous and open debate, but what happens is that
people take anything you say, they turn it, they twist it--as you put it, they
put the most cynical interpretation on it, and the result is you get plastic
politicians who won't ever say anything. You get people who won't stand up
for their belief system, and the public looks at politicians on TV, and
everybody sounds alike, and all they get is pabulum. They don't get anything
real and meaningful out of them, So I just--I think America--I really believe
our country's better than this and we've been--politicians are underestimating
our people, and I think that theory ought to be tested.

DAVIES: Well, we'll see if you give it a test. You know, I wanted to just
ask one more question about 2004. You know, when you're the vice-presidential
candidate, you are a part of the team, you're in on key strategy discussions,
but it's different from your previous campaigns where you're in charge. You
have a voice but not the say, and I'm wondering--I'm sure you've thought about
the campaign, it was close. What could the campaign have done differently
that might have allowed them to win?

Mr. EDWARDS: Oh, I--you know, I try not to go back and analyze it. Of
course I do, I'm human, like anybody else. I don't--I'm not for a minute
going to mislead I haven't thought about what could have been done differently
and better, but the things that could have been done differently and better
are the obvious things that everyone's talked about, including my running
mate. So, you know, there's the swift-boat issue. There's the issue about
the war in Iraq--I mean, being clear about huge issues like that. But that's
all 20/20 hindsight. You know, we were in the middle--as you put it, we were
in the middle of the vortex, and you learn--I mean, you learn. One of the
great things that this experience has taught me is that America is looking for
leaders, not politicians. America is looking for somebody, a man or woman, of
strength, who will stand for what they believe in, who has a real vision for
where America's going to go, and we talked about this a few minutes ago, and
somebody who will be themselves, who's comfortable in their own skin, for good
and bad, and I don't--I think that's one of the great lessons of this whole
process.

DAVIES: My guest is former US senator and Democratic vice-presidential
candidate John Edwards. He has edited a new book about a variety of Americans
describing and reflecting on their childhood homes. It's called "Home: The
Blueprint of Our Lives."

We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

DAVIES: If you're just joining us, my guest is former US senator and
Democratic vice-presidential candidate John Edwards.

Now you decided not to run for re-election in 2004 and, lo and behold, two
years later Democrats now will control both houses of Congress, and I'm
wondering if you wish you were there, but I guess, my more direct question is,
you know, what should Democrats do? They've been criticized for standing
against things but failing to present a coherent vision. Let's talk about
Iraq. What should they do in Iraq?

Mr. EDWARDS: We have to change course in Iraq. And the Democrats--we don't
have the White House--but the Democrats should lead the way to the extent
they're capable of since we're now in control of the Congress. And I think
the American people spoke very loudly in this election in 2006 about Iraq.
They made it clear they want to see a change in policy, a change in course.
At least from my perspective, what we should be doing in Iraq is making it
clear that we're going to leave, that the best way to prove that is to
actually start leaving. You know, if I were in charge, I'd take at least
40,000 troops out immediately from the secure regions of Iraq. I'd be saying
to my military leadership, `I want to see a plan to have our combat troops out
of Iraq in, you know, roughly 12 to 18 months. No exact time, but I'd want to
see the most efficient, most effective way to accomplish that and...'

DAVIES: Well, you know, that's--if I can just interrupt, Senator...

Mr. EDWARDS: Sure.

DAVIES: ...that's a decisive step, but if you look at the reports from Iraq,
it's hard to find any evidence that Iraq security forces are going to be able
to cope, and I'm wondering if doing that, withdrawing 40,000 troops and then
indicating that more are to follow, if you see escalating violence and
disintegration, is that an outcome that Democrats can accept?

Mr. EDWARDS: I think--first of all, I think that anybody who says to the
American people that we can have--follow this course and we will be successful
and Iraq will be democratic and secure is not telling the truth. We are in a
terrible place in Iraq. We should be honest about that. We should be honest
about how we got there. How in the world can we have the moral authority to
lead in the world without a foundation of honesty? You know, we thought that
he had weapons of mass destruction. He did not. People like me voted for
this war. I was wrong. And we need to tell the country the truth about that.
And then we need to say to the country we have bad choices and worse choices,
because this is the situation we're confronted with. And, by the way, the men
and women who are serving in Iraq, they didn't make a mistake. They're
doing--they're there serving heroically on behalf of us, our country. So we
owe it to them to do what's right and the best thing under the circumstances
and not be driven by ideology. And to me, the best way to improve the chances
of being successful--because if you look at what's happening now, the
situation is extraordinarily unstable. The situation particularly around
Baghdad is chaotic. We're clearly policing a low-level civil war. There's no
question about that. And at some point, the Iraqis--we've been there for
years now, spent many billions of dollars--at some point, they're going to
actually have to look out for themselves, and we can't be the policeman of
this ethnic violence that's going on every single day in Iraq.

Now, I would add, because I didn't say this earlier, I think it's important
also for us to reach out to other countries, other leaders in that region of
the world to say, `You've been saying you want to secure Iraq and you can't do
it because America is an occupying force there, well, now's your chance to
prove it.' They clearly aren't going to do it as long as we're there in the
numbers and force that we have on the ground in Iraq right now.

DAVIES: You visited Iowa several times since last year. Are you running for
president?

Mr. EDWARDS: Maybe.

DAVIES: What does...

Mr. EDWARDS: That's a resounding maybe.

DAVIES: Well, I didn't expect anything different. What does it depend on?

Mr. EDWARDS: First and foremost, that Elizabeth continued to do well. And
you were nice enough to ask about her earlier. She's doing great. And then
just a judgment at the time about whether I think it's good for my country for
me to do this. Once I've gotten by the question of whether it's good for my
family, is it good for my country? Do I have a vision for America and the
world that I think needs to be heard.

DAVIES: You know, I have to ask you your reaction to John Kerry's, you know,
comment that created such a firestorm of controversy before the election when
he, in a speech, ended up saying that `if you don't get an education, you
could get stuck in Iraq,' and conservatives tried to suggest that he was
demeaning troops. He said that he simply botched a joke about Bush. You
know, you had so much experience with John Kerry during that intense 2004
campaign. I was wondering what went through your mind as you watched that
unfold.

Mr. EDWARDS: Oh, I felt bad for him. I just felt bad for him. He's my
friend. It wasn't complicated. I felt bad for him, and I told some of my
friends, I said, you know, `I could have already told you that neither John
Kerry or John Edwards could tell a joke.' I wasn't surprised that he botched
the joke. But I just felt badly for him. I think he just made a mistake, and
it spiraled out of control, and I think the Republicans were looking for
anything they could grab hold of in a case situation where they were about to
lose as they did.

DAVIES: You're now president of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity
at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I guess one might describe
it as a think tank looking at ways that Americans can fight poverty. You
know, during the 2004 campaign, you were famous for a "two Americas" speech in
which you talked about, you know, the well-off America and the forgotten
America, to paraphrase, and you've been spending a lot of time on this issue.
I noticed you did a tour with some hotel union workers advocating for better
wages and working conditions there. I mean, do you see the fight against
poverty as the issue of 2008?

Mr. EDWARDS: The truth of the matter is, when I go to my grave, if I feel
like I've done something serious about poverty in America, I'll feel like I
did something good with my life. And that's the way I think about this. I
don't have any way of knowing what the political implications are, negative or
positive. I mean, there weren't many people doing anything about it. I
thought there was a vacuum, I cared about it, and so that's what I've been
trying to do.

DAVIES: Well, John Edwards, thanks so much for speaking with us.

Mr. EDWARDS: Oh, thank you for having me.

DAVIES: Former Senator John Edwards is now director of the Center for
Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. He's edited a new book called "Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives."

I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Julian Dibbell, author of "Play Money: Or, How I Quit
My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot," discusses
online interactive games where players make money selling virtual
assets
DAVE DAVIES, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave DAVIES, filling in for Terry Gross.

The New York Times reported last month that the automaker Nissan bought an
island and created a driving course to promote its new Sentra model. But
while Nissan paid real money for the promotional assets, the island and
driving course were imaginary. They were digital images in the online
interactive game Second Life, one of several computer games where tens or
hundreds of thousands of players at a time interact in a virtual world.
Reuters has even opened a news bureau on Second Life. My guest Julian Dibbell
spent more than a year playing the game Ultima Online, and he's written a book
about one of the more bizarre outgrowths of the online game world, the sale of
imaginary assets--weapons, houses and gold--on eBay and other auction sites
for real money. Some traders in virtual goods, he says, are making hundreds
of thousands of dollars a year, blurring the line between play and work in a
digital age. His book is called "Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and
Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot."

Well, Julian Dibbell, welcome to FRESH AIR. I wonder if you could start maybe
by sharing with our audience a sense of what it's like to be in these online
role-playing games where you're interacting with people all over the country,
and you describe this fascinating moment where you are in a game and you've
gotten in the habit of killing these lizard men, which I gather you take the
skins and then you can take them to the bank of this imaginary world and sell
them for money, and you have an encounter with another player after you make
the deal.

Mr. JULIAN DIBBELL: Right. Right. I've gone--and, you know, and this is a
very relaxing stress-relieving activity to go into the dungeons and slay these
lizard men who when I was an early arrival to this virtual world slayed me a
lot, or slew me a lot, so now that I've gotten enough power, it's fun to go in
and just slaughter them randomly and take their skins. As I was heading back
into the dungeon, there was a stranger there, another player hanging out, and
he, you know, sort of typed, you know, `What's up?' And I was like, you know,
`Hi,' and suddenly I'm seeing these strange words appearing and flashes of
lightning and so forth, and I realized he's attacking me with magic spells,
and he's much more powerful than I am, and before I know it, I'm dead and he's
looting me, and then because there's not that much loot on my body, he kills
my horse, just for the hell of it and says, you know, `Next time bring
something I can really use and maybe I won't kill your horse.'

DAVIES: Now, let's just take a step back here and widen the lens a little
bit. These things are called MMPORGS, right? Massively Multi-Player Online
Role-Playing Games. Paint a bit of a picture of this world for the audience.

Mr. DIBBELL: Yeah. M-M-O-R-P-Gs, MMORPGs, or MMOs are one of the
fastest-growing sectors of the computer games business. World of Warcraft is
the market leader right now and has almost seven million players worldwide,
and there are probably another three million people playing various other
games, and they--each one of these games can have hundreds of thousands of
people interacting at any one time, and it's very complex interaction because
some people want to kill this monster. Some people want to kill that monster.
Other people just want to become trades people in the game, become armor
makers or sword makers, and they all rely on each other for different
resources, and so this produces very complex social and ultimately economic
interactions.

DAVIES: So--and there's real estate. There are islands. There are homes.
And some people trade, some people buy, some people sell.

Mr. DIBBELL: Right, exactly. There are--some people even sell the accounts,
the characters themselves once they have been built up to a certain level, you
can sell to somebody else who just, you know, buying a fancy car or something
that they want to take out into the world and show off their stuff.

DAVIES: Now, where it gets really weird, of course, is where you have these
imaginary assets, you know, potions, homes, skills and gold pieces which are
used to evaluate them in imaginary economy, and those get converted into real
hard American dollars, and early in the book, you describe a guy called Lee
Caldwell who has a business called Blacksnow Interactive. What is their
business?

Mr. DIBBELL: You know, let me back it up and sort of explain this whole
phenomenon, which really boggles most people's minds that have never played
these games or known someone who did. It happens that these items are all
very difficult to acquire. The point of the game is that it's hard to acquire
this magic sword or that castle or this pile of gold pieces that will allow
you to buy those things. And many people lack the patience or the time to
really commit to, you know, the 80 hours or so it will take to get an Orc, you
know, a Sword of Ultimate Orc Slaying, and yet they have friends who are
pulling ahead in the game, and they want to keep up with them, or you know,
for various reasons, they will say, `Well, look, instead of putting in all
those hours sitting there clicking and running around, why don't I just go on
eBay and see if somebody there is selling the Sword of Ultimate Orc Slaying
for real money, and you know, a very valuable rare, powerful weapon, they
might find being sold for, you know, 5 or $600 and happily pay it.

And so these guys that you mentioned, Lee Caldwell and his Black Snow
business, were in that kind of line of business, but what they were also doing
was getting into the manufacturing side of it, the production end so--and
that's called farming, which is when your business is to go into the
wilderness and mine for ore over and over again or slay the lizard men over
and over again and just take those items that you have produced and take them
and sell them at market yourself without dealing with the middleman.

DAVIES: Which sounds awfully time-consuming. I'm out there learning some
online skills, mining an ore or slaying lizards, and I've got to get good
enough to make money at it. Can you hire other people to do it?

Mr. DIBBELL: Well, that's...

DAVIES: That was the rumor, right?

Mr. DIBBELL: ...that was the rumor. I'd heard that that was going on. Lee
Caldwell was the first person I've ever confirmed of actually doing that, and
he worked out of Southern California, and he and his boys had gone down to
Tijuana and rented an office space and set up eight work stations there and
run in an Internet line and hired 24 unskilled Mexican laborers to play these
games, you know, in round-the-clock shifts, which, you know, sounds like a
bizarre thing to think of, but, you know, if you do the math, and you think,
`Well, somebody in this game can produce, you know, $3 worth of valuable stuff
just by playing in an hour, if I can go somewhere where the going labor rate
is, you know, $1 an hour or less, then it seems stupid not to.'

DAVIES: If you're just joining me, my guest is Julian Dibbell. His new book
is called "Play Money."

We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

DAVIES: If you're just joining me, my guest is Julian Dibbell. He has a new
book called, "Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading
Virtual Loot."

And if this sounds a little weird, that's because it's a little weird. We're
talking about how Julian and other people have made real money by immersing
themselves in online role-playing games involving thousands of other players
and then accumulating imaginary assets and selling them for real money.

I'd like you to tell the story of this one fellow you met, Bob Kiblinger, if I
have the name right...

Mr. DIBBELL: Mm-hmm.

DAVIES: ...and he buys the account of a fellow named Troy Stolle...

Mr. DIBBELL: Troy Stolle, yeah.

DAVIES: Stolle, right, and in effect he hears what Troy Stolle has, his
assets in the game, negotiates a good price. Tell us, what does he get in
Troy Stolle's game account and what he does with it.

Mr. DIBBELL: Well, Troy Stolle was a union carpenter in Indianapolis who had
been fanatically playing the game for many months and acquired a lot of
skills, and ultimately acquired--his most valuable asset was a large
tower--the real estate market in Ultimate Online was very strong at the
time--and through his efforts, he had built himself a large tower, which is a
three-story affair. And after 9/11 he lost his job, and, you know, he had a
kid to raise, and so he sold his account to Bob Kiblinger for $500. Bob is a
guy who lives in West Virginia and does this for a living, and a very good
living it is. He had been a chemist at Procter & Gamble before quitting it to
go into the business, and his name's on a patent for Febreze, and he was
having a lot more fun trading items, and ultimately he made a lot more money.
Does, you know, six figures, easily.

DAVIES: He makes over $100,000 a year buying and trading these virtual
assets?

Mr. DIBBELL: Yes, and that's putting it mildly. So he--you know, what he
did, he went through Troy Stolle's whole account, you know, he found lots of
sort of rare treasures and things, and he would break them all out and put
them up on his Web site which was sort of just a big shopping mall, a big
department store for Ultimate Online items, and then he broke out the tower
itself as a separate item and put it on eBay and priced it at $750 and very
quickly got a taker. I forget the guy's name but he was a Wonder Bread
deliveryman in Oklahoma, and he was the one who bought it, and I talked to him
a bit about it, and that was--he explained it. I said, `Look, you're not a
rich man. Why is it that you would spend, you know, $750 on this imaginary
house.' And he said, `You just--what can I say? You go around as a young
player, as a Newb looking at these fancy houses, you wonder who lives there,
how did they acquire the wealth to get there, what kind of person are they?'
And it just makes you an object of regard to own a big house, and he wanted to
have it.

DAVIES: Now, so we have these assets that--some are acquired by just making
smart deals and buying them from other players who either are getting out of
the game or just want to get rid of them. Some cases you actually generate
the assets by playing the game, mining for gold, etc., and then you discover
that there are some people who have taken this yet another step by inventing
computer macros which in effect act like people replicating tasks that would
generate wealth, right?

Mr. DIBBELL: Right. A guy named Rich Thurman, who I spoke to at length, had
in his closet, he sent me a photograph of it. Twenty-one machines, it was
ultimately 50 computers, each one running two or three instances of the game,
and on each one of those, you know, an automated worker robot going into the
mountains or running around from vendor to vendor doing things that would
produce gold and so this was wonderful for him. You know, he would come home
in the evening, he had a day job, a well-paying one, and in the evening, he
would come home and, you know, twiddle with his robots and make sure
everything was running on track and then go to bed, and, you know, in the
morning wake up and check how much gold had piled up in his bank box and sell
it off to some eBay marketer like myself. And he made, I think it was $81,000
in the year that I spoke to him, just working his army of worker robots.

DAVIES: So you have a character in the game, and one way to do this is to
have an underpaid foreign worker manipulating the character, but his way was
to write a computer program so that he, in effect, had a robot replicating
these tasks, generating gold pieces.

Mr. DIBBELL: Right.

DAVIES: Now the people who run the game, I gather, send around cops, in
effect, right, and try to talk to the robots to see if they're a real person
or a robot? How does that work?

Mr. DIBBELL: Right, well, this is obviously, you know, against the rules,
right, if anything is. This is sort of the ultimate form of cheating, so the
game masters, the cops, have developed these tricks for going in and
interrogating these workers, you know, to see if they're real people or not,
and so it becomes a game of--you know, an arms race where the games master
will get into this interrogation and then the robot designers will rewrite
their robots to sort of say, `Oh,' you know, as soon as the game master walks
into the area, they'll suddenly type something like, `Oh, gosh, I have to go
to the bathroom, I'll be right back,' and log off, so you never quite get the
proof. But then the game masters came up with this, OK, here's another one,
if we can engage them long enough, we'll hold up a little colored wand, you
know, and say, `What color is my wand,' because, you know, it's very hard to
read the colors, you know, just with a computer program.

DAVIES: So, in other words, what we have is the game master is, in effect, a
cop for the administrators of the game. He sees a character, talks to it to
see if it responds like a human or a robot...

Mr. DIBBELL: Right.

DAVIES: ...and then the robots are getting better at responding in ways, and
one of the ways to trick them is to hold up something colorful and say, `What
color is it?' and a robot won't know.

Mr. DIBBELL: Right. And so, basically, it's an elaborate universion of the
Turing Test, you know, which was Alan Turing's, you know, how will we know if
computers have intelligence? Well, as soon as they can, you know, fool
somebody in a conversation, that's that. And it has happened, and one of the
things that Rich came up with that was brilliant was once they started doing
this wand-waving thing, he had his robots designed to--as soon as a game
master walked in the room--to send a message to him on his cell phone so that
wherever he was, at work...

DAVIES: Send a message to Rich, not...

Mr. DIBBELL: To Rich. Yes. His cell phone.

DAVIES: The real human being.

Mr. DIBBELL: Right. Yeah. You know, if he was at home, at dinner with his
family, he would hop up and get on the computer and say, `Hey, what's up?
Just me sitting here, you know, innocent little me just mining away,' and they
would say, `OK.'

DAVIES: Now, how big do these operations get, I mean, these ones that are
dedicated to generating imaginary wealth like this?

Mr. DIBBELL: Well, as I said, there was, you know, Rich eventually had 50
computers going in his closet. I recently visited China where the innovation
of Lee Caldwell, which was kind of a flash in the pan at the time, has now
become a full-blown industry there. There are probably a thousand gold farms
there, as they're called, factories where workers are being paid to play these
games, and they will have, you know, 50 or 75 workers at one spot and then, as
I said, multiplied by, you know, maybe a thousand throughout the country.

DAVIES: So this is a place in China, or many places, where you would have, in
effect, a computer warehouse and people hired to sit all day replicating tasks
in a computer game to generate imaginary wealth, which is then sold for real
money.

Mr. DIBBELL: Exactly. Yeah. The robots, you know, take a lot of
baby-sitting, you know. They'll get hung up on certain--you know, they'll get
caught in the trees as they're running around or something, and you need
occasionally to check in and, you know, unsnag them, so you'll be paying, you
know, a Chinese laborer 25 cents to watch three or four robots at a time
instead of just playing one at a time.

But, you know, and it all sounds very industrialized and demystified and not
very fun at all, and when I went, I sort of--I imagined that these workers
would be, you know, desperate, you know, immigrants from the poorer provinces
of China, just off the bus from...(unintelligible)...or wherever, and you
know, just corralled into these shops. Well, you know, OK, I'll do this and
that, you know, the people running the factories would be sort of middle-aged
businessmen looking for any angle they could, but, in fact, they were all
gamers. The workers and the owners had all started out as avid players of
these games and been drawn to this business for that reason, and even though
the conditions are grueling--12-hour days, one day off a month, in the one
shop I was at, $4 a day for this work--they're all clearly still playing on
some of them. They're all gathering around each other, you know, giving
advice about how to deal with this or that monster or, you know, that type of,
you know, strategy, and they're all still engaged in some way as gamers, even
though they recognize it as a dead-end job and very grueling and so forth.
It's a very--I thought that when I got to these sweat shops, that I would be
witnessing, you know, the ultimate triumph of work over play and the death of
play, and yet, fascinatingly, it was all confused. And in their, you know,
two hours of free time that they have, you know, after the shift gets off and
they have to go to bed in their workers' quarters--you know, five guys to a
room and plywood bunks, it fascinated me to see that one of the most popular
things to do to relax and unwind was to go downstairs to the Internet cafe in
the same building and play the exact same games...

DAVIES: No.

Mr. DIBBELL: ...they had been working for another two or three hours, you
know...

DAVIES: Oh, my heavens!

Mr. DIBBELL: ...and thoroughly excited and engaged. Yeah. I'm still
processing that. I don't know what to make of it.

DAVIES: I'm afraid you're going to spur a migration of 12-year-old American
kids to China to join this army. These guys actually--they lived and worked
in these places?

Mr. DIBBELL: Yeah, yeah. And they were in fact all immigrants from other
places, but they were all gamers. They had all--you know, it required a
literacy in these games to do this work because it wasn't like, you
know--another thing I imagined was they would be handed scripts by their
bosses, you know, and say, `You have to fight this monster, then that monster,
and as, you know, you get up to a certain level, you have to do that,' and, in
fact, you know, it was to a certain extent left up to them to improvise what
the best strategies would be to, you know, to farm and so forth. And so,
though it was all work, there was a lot of, you know, mutual consultation
about what the best strategy would be and a lot of, you know, stuff that was
very hard to distinguish from, you know, what regular players are doing.

DAVIES: My guest is Julian Dibbell. His new book is called "Play Money."

We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

DAVIES: If you're just joining us, my guest is Julian Dibbell. He's a
writer, and his new book is called play and work in a digital age. His book
is called, "Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading
Virtual Loot." It's his account of his immersion in role-playing online games,
which involve thousands of players and how he and others made real money
dealing in imaginary assets, like gold, weapons, houses, potions.

Is there addiction counseling for people who are too obsessed with this?

Mr. DIBBELL: Yeah, there's a small but burgeoning industry of addiction
counselors dealing with all kinds of online addiction. In China, they're
especially concerned about it. China is experiencing an incredible boom with
these things, and when I was there, you know, there were news accounts of, you
know, shelters for, you know, addicted young people in certain cities. You
know, people were checking in there, and, you know, and they'll occasionally
run stories of someone who dropped dead in an Internet cafe, you know, after
playing World of Warcraft for 80 hours straight or something. But, you know,
again, it's hard to sort out the odd outlying case or the media sensationalism
from, you know, the actual risk of addiction in these worlds.

DAVIES: One of the most remarkable things that you mentioned from China in
the book is there was an actual murder over a virtual asset, right?

Mr. DIBBELL: Yes. The story is pretty well-confirmed. A fellow lent a very
valuable weapon--I think it was a sword--from one of these games to a friend,
who then turned around and sold it for real money, and the guy was incensed,
you know, went to the game company for redress, the game company sort of
laughed at him. He went to the police for redress, who also shooed him away
and eventually went over to his friend's house, got in a big fight with him
and killed him with a real knife, and you know, he's now in jail. And, you
know, that was a big news story in China, and partly in consequence of that
kind of story, you'll find that the Chinese court system increasingly is much
more sympathetic to the claims of players against game companies, that the
game companies in fact are sort of fiduciary parties, you know, holding real
assets for these people.

DAVIES: Well, Julian Dibbell, what's fascinating about this whole game world
is that we're now seeing corporations--this sounds strange--but they're paying
money for a marketing presence in imaginary worlds, right?

Mr. DIBBELL: Right. Right. This is particularly the case of Second Life,
but the real adventure there is that the players themselves are allowed to
construct the world. They're given a tool kit with which to build objects and
create and sell commodities and, therefore, starting to attract a certain
amount of attention from companies that, you know, have hitherto existed only
in the real world, you know. American Apparel has opened a shop in Second
Life, and you can go in and buy, you know, American Apparel line items for
your character. And so you have them. You have Honda recently released--you
know, I think it was a prototype of its new Scion or whatever inside the game.

But what people are missing in this wave of publicity about, you know, the
marketing efforts in Second Life is that there already was, you know, before
these big companies came in, a lot of people making a lot of money in Second
Life, either creating brands that were very popular with the characters in
there, clothing brands, furniture brands, or working in the real estate
business there, which is hotter than hot. There's a woman who was on the
cover of BusinessWeek a few weeks ago named Anshe Chung who makes millions
buying land from the company, as it creates it in this game, and then sort of
developing and reselling it to players in the game.

DAVIES: Well, Julian Dibbell, thanks so much for speaking with us.

Mr. DIBBELL: Thank you.

DAVIES: Julian Dibbell's book is called, "Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day
Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot."

(Credits)

DAVIES: For Terry Gross, I'm Dave Davies.

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