fiefoe

The play:

a far profounder development in the history of play: its decisive infiltration of that most serious of human pursuits, the creation of wealth.
In Csikszentmihalyi's analysis, what this man regularly experiences at work is a condition called "flow"-an exhilarating and uniquely fulfilling convergence of attention and purpose.
Flow alone, in other words, does not suffice to turn work into play.
And everyone, of course, must make a separate peace with the profound ambivalence of the "grind": the tantalizing, enervating treadmill of monster bashing, ... (that) all too often leaves you feeling sick, unhinged, and inexplicably compelled.
Somehow, through some obscure mutation of postindustrial human consciousness, it's still play even when you sort of hate it.
the stark distinction between work and play the rest of us take to be a universal fact of life turns out (to be) an invention of the modern West.
The military, of course - with its rich history of war games dating back through the eighteenth-century Prussian Kriegsspiel to the Persian origins of chess - has long been ground zero for the confusion of play and productivity

The money:

More colloquially, you could say (economics) is about the ways people try to get what they need in a world where they can't always get what they want. Deprivation, solidly embedded in the discipline's founding assumptions, literally defines it.
The addictive, highly profitable appeal of MMOs suggests that people will choose the world that constrains them over the one that sets them free.
"What we're learning is that scarcity itself is an essential variable,... The emergence of virtual communities means that we have to make it explicit."
Economic theory tells us, after all, that scarcity breeds markets.

"Play Money"