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BY JULIAN DIBBELL
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Thursday, July 27, 2006

Today Is the Day. Second Life Is the Place. 12 and 6 pm PDT Are the Times.  

















Thank you, Hamlet Au and Millions of Us.

2:53 AM



Tuesday, July 25, 2006

'Play Money' Gets a Second Life  
You’ve been catching wind of it for months: Rumor long has had it that Play Money, the zany online diary of my adventures in the virtual-loot trade, was on its way to a revised and greatly expanded new life as a book. Perhaps you’ve heard the latest whisperings, fevered and improbable: That Amazon has been shipping orders of the book for weeks now. That such notables as Lawrence Lessig, Steven Levy, Caterina Fake, and other keen-eyed Web-watchers got their hands on the book months ago and have been calling it variously “brilliant and beautifully written,” “compelling (and hilarious),” “a fascinating account,” and worse.

Hearsay, the lot of it, and I come neither to confirm nor to deny such premature speculations, but simply to announce, at long last and without further embroidery, the official official release of Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot to better booksellers everywhere.

And when I say everywhere, I'm like, everywhere. Posterity alone will judge Play Money’s lasting value, but I can tell you here and now that its official official release makes marketing history. Behold: You bear witness here to the first mainstream-publishing title ever to go on sale simultaneously as both a physical and a virtual object, available for purchase in the currency of either the real world or a virtual one. Second Life is the virtual world in question, and if you want to get a handle on how this momentous turn in the evolution of merchandising actually works, you could do much worse than take a look at veteran Second Life chronicler Hamlet Au’s suitably dizzied write-up over on his New World Notes blog (“On behalf of Julian Dibbell, ‘Julian Dibbell’ is selling Play Money for play money”). Or better still, join me and Hamlet live in Second Life this Thursday, July 27, for a mass virtual booksigning and free-wheeling conversation about gold farms, pixel crack, and other signs of global capitalism’s impending collapse into worlds of play.

Watch this space for details. In the meantime, count on it: You’re officially invited. Like, officially officially.

12:58 AM



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