{"product_id":"play-money","title":"Play Money","description":"Play Money  explores the remarkable new phenomenon of MMORPGs, or Massively MultiPlayer Online Role-Playing Games, in which hundreds of thousands of players operate fantasy characters in virtual environments. With city-sized populations, these games generate their own cultures, governments, and social systems and, inevitably, their own economies, which spill over into the real world. The desire for virtual goods-magic swords, enchanted breastplates, and special, hard-to-get elixirs-has spawned a cottage industry of  virtual loot farmers\": people who play the games just to obtain fantasy goods that they can sell in the real world. The best loot farmers can make between six figures a year and six figures a  month .  Play Money  is an extended walk on the weird side: a vivid snapshot of a subculture whose denizens were once the stuff of mere sociological spectacle but now-with computer gaming poised to eclipse all otherentertainments in dollar volume, and with the lines between play and work, virtual and real increasingly blurred-look more and more like the future.","brand":"Basic Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Product","offer_id":54227825394008,"sku":"9780465015368","price":23.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780465015368__6774c6ad436e1.jpg?v=1741134868","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/play-money","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}