"Play Money"

[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.

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