Playing with the Future

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Play is not only necessary to developing the creative problem-solving skills needed in the information economy, it may actually be a key driver of it. Speaker Julian Dibbell suggested that the open-source software movement, popularized in the media as a kind of mass exercise in software programmers' altruism, is in fact a product of play. Much like gearhead mechanics trick out their cars, Dibbell argued, open-source programmers volunteer hours of their time to coding out of a sense of good-natured competition, a desire to solve puzzles by making the software work in new ways, and the drive to win prestige among peers.

Play as a productive activity is different from traditional work in 'the sense that play is its own reward,' Dibbell told Utne. But play also can bring a lucrative financial reward, as Dibbell proved during a year he spent supporting himself largely by trading virtual objects for cold hard cash. By selling swords, armor, cloaks, and even a castle from the game Ultima Online on eBay, Dibbell earned as much as $3,917 a month, an experience he chronicles in his new book, Play Money (Basic Books).

That kind of play-as-work isn't immune from exploitation. Already, Dibbell said, sweatshop-like operations known as 'gold farms' have appeared in China and Mexico, where legions of young gamers are paid a pittance to spend hours online accumulating experience points and virtual gold pieces for their employers. And websites like TopCoder.com are using contests to entice unpaid programmers to produce software code, which the company sells for profit. Dibbell even envisions a somewhat frightening future in which work previously left to skilled professionals-say, analyzing X-rays-could be 'embedded' into video games and done by joystick-wielding gamers with newly trained eyes.

Play, it seems, may be a positive source of innovation, but it isn't all fun and games.

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