"Play Money" [.]

<Game mechanics:>

• being ganked for the first time: The encounter had engaged my limbic system as much as my intellect, triggering reflexes wired deep into the biology of human motivation. .. I could see more clearly than ever what kept me and all the other players coming back. (the desire) To own and not be owned.
• land-grabbing: "It was so stressful," Stolle recalled. "You're sitting there, you double-click the deed once and then click on the spot. And so I did this for four hours, standing in one place."
• So what I did is, I programmed the bots to send me an instant message at work anytime a GM showed up, and I could start IMing answers back to the GM right away.
• That Jammaster had lined me up as a fence a full day before committing the crime didn't help - anybody that calculatingly predatory was plainly nobody to get mixed up with.
• sales of game-time codes for gold (allowing players without credit cards, or even real money, to pay their monthly UO subscription fee in gp),
• In time I would learn of other, equally robust business models: the house-camping specialty, ... looking for and cataloging "condemned" properties (houses marked for deletion unless their absentee owners logged in within the next five days),
• whose collective capacity to take video games seriously
• The original rares had been accidents, pieces of the graphical scenery - even error messages - that were supposed to be fixed in place but had somehow been left untethered, so that players could pick them up and carry them home.
• ... whether my writing was ultimately just an intellectual fig-leaf covering the naked philistinism of my urge to trade, and whether my pathetically underpowered resolve would ever permit either line of work to define me once and for all.
• Mithra and Rich to set in motion their plan for the day when other farmers caught on to their method and inevitably began to dilute the value of its output: They were going to shut it down dead.

<<