"Play Money"

[fiefoe]

Julian Dibbell seemed too starry-eyed to me from the very start. His awed, wondering tone recalls coverages of 'the new economy' and the 'lamented' internet boom, and do we really want to go there again? But then, what's the right tone to tell people about new new things?

• It was an allegory -a picture in geography of what feels more and more like the central fact of life on this globalized planet: the steady migration of material wealth into realms of the immaterial, of virtuality and emptiness.
• gold-farming: the haze of world-historical significance around it
• Capitalism is a permanent revolution, Marx observed - a constant revision of the tools of production and the social relations they entail. {Word.}
• (In "All that is solid melts into air"), Marx hints at an even broader consequence: a relentless drift toward abstraction at every stage of the productive process.
• Look at any quarter of the world's economic landscape, and you'll see the forces of dematerialization either on the rise or in full swing... Financial instruments have billowed up into complex derivatives many layers of abstraction removed from the material goods they represent. ... material goods themselves cede pride of place to brands, copyrights, patents and other intangibles more and more central to the creation of wealth.
• the computer has been an icon of that condition - a concrete engine of abstract production
• "Casino capitalism" is political-economist Susan Strange's label for an international economic system in which speculative financial dealings... have come to dwarf in monetary value the global trade in goods and services.

__ Which is why when you look down from a certain level of abstraction at any... turn-based game at all, in fact - you find that its workings are essentially no different from those of the abstract machine Turing described.
__ But only games share the universal machine's thoroughgoing commitment to the principle of  recursion: the chained repetition of simple operations, each building on both the input of the
moment and the outcomes of the preceding steps.
__ "Adventure was a metaphor for computer programming itself - the deep recesses you explored in the Adventure world were akin to the basic, most obscure levels of the machine that you'd be traveling in when you hacked assembly code.