Still toiling away as an elementary school teacher or a firefighter? Turns out you could probably be making more money as a troll or a night elf playing World of Warcraft.
World of Warcraft is a popular, massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG, that takes place in a Lord of the Rings-inspired world of wizards and warriors.
Recent advances in video game technology have allowed users to assume a virtual identity and interact with thousands of other gamers in three-dimensional, Internet-based worlds. MMORPGs allow gamers to build up their character's attributes by completing goals and collecting items, and typically charge a monthly subscription fee for access to the servers that power the vast online realms.
In 2004, the launch of games like Sony Online Entertainment's Everquest II and Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft, along with increased access to broadband Internet, turned a niche market into a global phenomenon.
In January, industry Web site MMOGchart.com put the total number of MMORPG subscriptions at over 13 million, and The NPD Group estimates that game developers raked in $292 million in subscription fees in 2005.
As the popularity and sophistication of MMORPGs has skyrocketed, enterprising gamers have found ways to make real money playing them--to the point where experts say that it has become common to run across gamers who make their entire income with virtual jobs.
"It's eminently doable," says Edward Castronova, an associate professor at Indiana University and author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. "If a person in Shanghai can live on a dollar a day, they can make their living playing video games."
Gamers mine virtual worlds for currency, build virtual real estate empires and even sell their virtual bodies-all in the name of real-world profit.
One such entrepreneur is Julian Dibbell, a contributing editor for Wired magazine, who in 2003 challenged himself to spend a year making a living as a retailer in the massively multiplayer game Ultima Online. Dibbell sold in-game items, currency and real estate on eBay, eventually making almost $4,000 a month in profits, translating into roughly a $36,000-a-year salary. And Dibbell says that his income only qualifies as lower-middle class among virtual businessmen.
"There are people making six figures," Dibbell says. "One-man operations, basically, doing seven figures. It's not hard to make money doing this."
The upshot, Dibbell says, is that as more users find ways to wring dollars out of gold pieces, games like World of Warcraft develop sophisticated economies, with measurable GDPs and exchange rates.
"On one level, there's very little that distinguishes this world from the real world," Dibbell says. And indeed when he talks about his experience--which he has documented in his new book Play Money -- it is sometimes hard to tell that he is talking about a universe that doesn't exist.
There's Dibbell's story about a real estate tycoon who pounced on foreclosed residences, invested in renovations, and sold them -- making around $40,000 a year in the process.
Or the one about the turf wars between bands of gold farmers, who would tip off the authorities when rival cartels encroached on their territory.
The similarities between virtual economies and real ones have emerged, Dibbell says, because MMORPGs have introduced the concept of scarcity to their games.
"What's kind of weird and interesting about these worlds is that it turns out that while a world of very negligible scarcity is appealing on one level, it's not very fun as a game," Dibbell says.
"The whole point of these games is to reintroduce a certain level of scarcity. And that's weird, in the context of the Internet, but it tends to make these economies much more like the real world."
Game developers have reacted in various ways to the phenomena of people earning their livings on their servers. In May, Blizzard, the publisher of World of Warcraft, banned over 30,000 gamers who were using automated processes to harvest gold, and removed over 30 million gold pieces ($4,048,582, according to GameUSD.com's latest exchange rate) from the game's economy.
Sony, on the other hand, recently opened Station Exchange, an online marketplace where EverQuest II gamers can buy, sell and trade currency and items.
Second Life, a comparatively small MMORPG, has an official currency exchange Web site and a boutique where users can buy computer hardware and other real-world commodities for Linden dollars, the game's in-world currency.
The trend has also attracted some attention from real-world governments. China, where many gold-farming companies are based, reportedly began penalizing gamers who play massively multiplayer games for more than three consecutive hours.
And Castronova says there are indications that the Korean government is considering penalizing real-money trade in online games as a "disruption of business."
After a year of trafficking in virtual items, Dibbell went to the IRS to ask if his virtual commerce should be taxed. "Their answer was 'yeah, that's very plausible, we just don't know,'" Dibbell says.
Given the IRS' very inclusive barter income rules, Dibbell says, even gamers who have no interest in turning gold pieces into dollars could eventually be subject to taxation, since the items being traded have fair market values.