Julian Dibbell discusses the concept of "ludo-capitalism", where play and games are becoming indistinguishable from economic production. He gives examples of virtual economies like gold farming where gameplay has become a form of outsourced labor. Dibbell also suggests this could spread to other areas, proposing hypothetical games that could crowdsource medical diagnoses or data tagging tasks, blurring the lines between work and play.

1. JULIAN DIBBELL
57 MILES: Hello everyone. Welcome to Metanomics, a Metaversed.com Event Series run
with Cornell Johnson School of Management. Welcome to the new sim, also; it’s been a
long time coming. In fact, we’ve been fretting and sweating and swearing at this thing for
weeks and weeks and weeks, as many of you know, and we finally have a usable, new,
minted sim for you guys to run around in and have a look at. And I hope you enjoy it.
Feedback is welcome. We’d love to hear what you think and we’ll be tweaking it over the
coming weeks based on that feedback. So that would be appreciated.
It’s good to mention here, I think, that the people behind this, very good friends of mine, and
a lead sponsor of metaversed.com is the Otherland Group. They’re an interesting group,
actually. They’re German guys that were responsible for a lot of advertising initiatives in
Second Life prior to forming the Otherland Group. We reported on them a few times on the
web site. And they put together this whole thing, the whole creative concept of Metaversed
Island, and I do thank them. You can find them at Otherland-Group.com.
Somebody on the line that can mute their mic, that would be great. We do thank you for
keeping your voice clients off during the presentation because--it’s not that we won’t disturb
the chats; in fact, we’d love you to talk your hearts out in text. It just puts the speakers off.
And it is appreciated.
Like to also thank the partners of the Metanomics series. These are the companies that are
walking the walk, if you’d like, the people that are actually doing this stuff in Second Life.

2. They are Sun Microsystems, Saxo Bank, Cornell University, SAP, Cisco, Kelly Services and
of course, lastly, like to thank SLCN. SLCN.TV that looks after all of our things here, all of
our video, and takes care of us in all manner of production. If you are looking for a
professional production of any kind of events in Second Life, those are the guys to talk to.
Without further ado, I would like to introduce you to your host today, Professor Robert
Bloomfield of the Johnson School of Management at Cornell, who will talk to you today
about today’s special guest, Julian Dibbell. Take it away, Robert.
BEYERS SELLERS: Hi. It’s Rob Bloomfield, Beyers Sellers. I’m back to host Metanomics,
and I hope you didn’t miss me too much. These partings are always so sad and sadly
frequent in Second Life. I think of them as teachable moments. Anyway, let me talk more
about what we have upcoming and, actually, next week on the 8th, the U.S. Congress looks
at the metaverse. We’re going to have Dan Miller, senior economist of the Joint Economic
Council of the U.S. Congress, talking about the legislative outlook for not just Second Life,
but virtual worlds, and we’re going to be focusing not only on tax issues, but on issues of
concern to the Department of Homeland Security. So that should be pretty interesting.
On the 15th we will be doing “Fashion and the Metaverse” and we’re going to have Raven
Pennyfeather, in-world fashion maven--I think largely Goth fashions, RFYRE, and will have
some other people as well. I think we’re going to start that out with a fashion show before
the usual start time, so come a little early on the 15th see what’s going on.
We’re going to have a tax scholar, Brian Camp, on the 22nd, and I guess that’s as far as I’ll

3. announce right now, though I do promise you a special Linden, Ginsu Linden, Gene Yoon,
will be joining us, I think the first week of November; more details when we get there.
Okay, so what I’d like to do now is introduce Julian Dibbell. Julian sort of made his name
with an article that he wrote in the Village Voice in 1993, “A Rape in Cyberspace,” a short
little article that was an inspiration to Lawrence Lessig, the Constitutional scholar, who wrote
the book, Code, and is famous for his perspective of code as law. And then more recently
he wrote the book, Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading
Virtual Loot.
But today, Julian, welcome, and what I’d like to do to start this conversation off is ask you a
little bit about some ideas you’re tossing around for what might be a new book, something
you call ludo-capitalism. So can you tell us what that is and what you’re thinking?
JULIAN DIBBELL: Well, sure. What I’m thinking about is some threads of argument that ran
through my most recent book, Play Money, which you can buy over here, a Second Life
copy of, thanks to the fabulous Second Life bookmaker, Falk Bergman), who’s here with us
today.
BEYERS SELLERS: And you’re probably too embarrassed to say this, Julian, but I will
point out that Julian gets all the proceeds, basically, if you buy it in-world, so be nice to the
people who take the time to show up on Metanomics for free. Anyway, sorry about that, go
on--ludo-capitalism.
JULIAN DIBBELL: Yeah, so that book is a memoir, really, of an experiment I conducted, a

4. year in which I attempted to make a living buying and selling virtual items. And this was from
2003 to 2004 at a time when Second Life was just barely a twinkle in Anche Chung’s eye.
And so the idea was not as mainstream back then as it is, not that it is especially now, but it
is more so now. So we were talking about virtual items that at the time, were suits of armor
and so forth and games like--oh, thank you very much, is there a little cha-ching sound you
can program into that every time someone purchases a copy? Because that would be very
entertaining, at least for me.
57 MILES: We’re working on it, Julian.
JULIAN DIBBELL: Okay, great. Maybe a little--one of those bicycle horn sounds. So this
was a very experiential narrative account of how the virtual economies of the world were
working at the time. And again, this is things like Ultima Online, EverQuest, now games like
World of Warcraft, of course, is the big one, and talking a lot about the colorful characters
you see in places like the gold farmers and people trying to corner the market and dodge
the game developers in various ways.
So what I was also trying to do in that book, besides narrate and chronicle what was going
on was think about what all this meant, in terms of how the economies of the world are
evolving. Now, this
[AUDIO GAP]
JULIAN DIBBELL: is obviously I’m going to assume roughly in the ballpark of what interests

5. people here because I know that the very notion of Metanomics, you know, is that ample
and that we’re not just interested here in how to make a buck selling virtual do-dads, but in--
BEYERS SELLERS: We cast our Metanomic net very widely.
JULIAN DIBBELL: Right. So the idea I really started to grapple with, and it was an idea that
I was grappling with from the moment I encountered my first gold farm--and to those
unfamiliar with the concept, that probably needs some unpacking. In games like World of
Warcraft and Ultima Online, you know, it’s very possible to very mechanistically, very
repetitively play the game in such a way that you pile up pieces of gold and other kinds of
loot that can then be sold on eBay and through other means to players who don’t have
necessarily the time to acquire these things, but do have the money. And so very early on
the obvious logic asserted itself that well, you know, a Western player will pay, you know,
five bucks for an amount of gold that you can acquire in this game in a space of an hour or
so. And you can go to Mexico or China and find people’s whose time is worth $2 an hour, $1
an hour, $0.50 an hour, and pay them to play these games.
BEYERS SELLERS: Okay, so Julian you were talking about what I would think of as
international arbitrage in gold farming, that it’s just--Americans can’t compete in scraping up
valuables from virtual worlds. Is that right?
JULIAN DIBBELL: Yeah. And so that’s the sort of inevitable source of what we know as the
golds farm, right? These third-world factories where kids are working for $0.30 an hour--in
China it is mostly, it turns out now playing World of Warcraft, Ultima Online, EverQuest,

6. these grindy sorts of virtual worlds where it’s possible to set up this kind of labor-intensive
farming of the virtual worlds.
And I’ve been writing about that. When I wrote about that recently I had the chance to go to
China and spend some time in some of these gold farms, and it’s been the one image that
has sort of most blown my mind throughout my looking at virtual economies. And what it got
me thinking about along these sort of larger lines of how is the world economy evolving, was
to think well, here is a very curious phenomenon where we have play that is actually a kind
of production, right? This is the second piece of what got me thinking along these lines was,
of course, Ted Castronova’s paper. This came out shortly before I started working in virtual
economies--on the Gross Domestic Product of EverQuest. Now, I understand you’re going
to be having Ted talking in this series later on or already have, so I won’t steal too much of
his rap. But the insight that he brings to it is that, from a classical econometric standpoint,
the play that goes on in these worlds where there is accumulation of persistent valuable
virtual items, is indistinguishable from production, from the creation of real wealth in the
Real World, from the classical economic point of view, right?
And so that just seemed to me to be the kernel of a potentially very transformative idea
about what’s going on in with global capitalism at this moment in history and, as I’ve said,
the name I’m working with is ludo-capitalism. Ludo, from the Latin words for “play and
games,” and capitalism. And this is the idea that there is a kind of infiltration of what has
long been sort of the most serious thing that Western civilization can do, which is to create
wealth, right? I mean this is what makes it all go around at this point. By that activity that is
the least serious, which is play.

7. And so there are sort of three levels of claim that I can make about this phenomenon and
the first is the simplest one which is that, yes, there are, in fact, places in the online world--
we’re in one of them--where the play or the ludic activity of people in video games is
becoming indistinguishable from classic economic production. Play is doing the work of
work and vice versa.
BEYERS SELLERS: Can I ask on that, Julian? So a lot of people enjoy their jobs and
professional musicians, artists, and writers like yourself presumably do this because they
enjoy it. Are you talking about something different, or is that really just an example of a case
where play is productive?
JULIAN DIBBELL: It’s not hugely different, but I think there’s a lot that sort of kicks it into
another level. You don’t necessarily--if I’m off doing amateur writing or amateur music, you
haven’t historically had on this sort of direct pipeline into any kind of quantifiable economy
that you have, for instance, in the virtual worlds and even that you have now with the
Internet and the kinds of space that there is for amateur production--YouTube and the
various multimedia social networking sites in which, yes, the things that people do for fun
that are creative and are potentially monetizable or potentially exploitable in an economy of
reputation or of social cred. This is novel. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself because
that would be the next level of generalizability that one would make about this phenomenon.
So, yes, it’s clear that video games themselves are becoming confused with economic
production of the classic, capitalist, economic sort. But then we can transition up to another

8. level of generalizability. Okay so these economies are being exploited within themselves,
but how might that spread out into the larger economy. Well then you have things like this
thought experiment that the psychologist, Nicholas Yee has written about. What if you took
a video game and went to these people who run these companies that do outsourcing of x-
ray diagnosis?
So, traditionally, you went and had your x-rays taken. They would go downstairs at the
hospital or the clinic to the radiologist who would look at it and give this expert opinion on
what was going on in the x-ray. Now what goes on often is not is that that specialized
opinion is being farmed out overseas to India. So it will be digitized, sent overnight to India
where, again, there’s this arbitrage going on where they could do this much more cheaply
there and then the diagnosis comes back the next morning by digital transmission.
Well, what you propose and what intrigues me is the notion that what if, instead of paying
somebody in the third world to do this x-ray diagnosis, you redesigned it as a kind of
videogame where you take--within the sort of science fiction virtual world, Massly multi-
player, online game, you have a sort of a crafting ladder where you specialize in pattern
recognition or pattern analysis or whatever? And over and over again you do this tedious job
of trying to pick out patterns in crazy images that are put before you. And once the system
has established that you have a certain minimal level of proficiency at that then it starts
dropping in the occasional actual x-ray, right? And it’s designed so that just by playing the
game you are doing the work of x-ray diagnosis. And suddenly, instead of paying somebody
even very little money to do this work, you actually have people who will be doing it for free
or even paying you for the fun of doing this work.

9. So that’s moving it out into the broader economy, making these games do something
besides just produce game value or gold coins, you’re actually doing “real work.”
Yeah, exactly, wicky healthcare is the comment. Is everyone hearing me? I guess so, from
the comments. Here in the backstage people are not sure if we’re communicating, it seems.
Great, glad to hear it.
So Beyers was leading into the next level of generalizability which would be that, well, you
know, isn’t this in fact going on in other ways already? And yes, I would argue, for instance,
that the open source economy itself which typically, when you have economists and
analysts looking at this phenomenon and scratching their heads over how is it that we have
people producing real, valuable assets in the world--real wealth, which is the creation of
things like Linux and Apache, how is it that suddenly we have people doing this for free?
And often the analysis runs to, well there’s a political dimension to it. They’re committed to
the idea that information must be free and so forth. Or, conversely this is the great debate
between Stalin and Eric Raymond. Eric Raymond would respond, “Well, no, it’s actually we
do this because this is the best way to create the best software.”
But if you sort of look more closely at the day-to-day why are people doing this, it really has
more to do with what I would call ludic motivations. They’re doing it on the one hand
because they’re sort of competing with one another to be that programmer whose code gets
incorporated into the next big build and/or they simply are pursuing the pleasure of coding,
which is talked about a lot, which Linus Torvalds himself talks about as a serious motivator.

10. So to a first analysis we have ludo-capitalism as a phenomenon that’s undeniable, that is
economies working in virtual worlds in World of Warcraft, in--
57 MILES: Okay, do we have problems again?
JULIAN DIBBELL: I’m not having a problem, but I will carry on. I was worrying about
Beyers. I’m sorry.
57 MILES: --too. Just carry on and I’ll bring him right in, Julian. He just dropped us--
JULIAN DIBBELL: Carrying on, carrying on.
57 MILES: Back with us, Beyers?
JULIAN DIBBELL: Not so much. Not so much.
57 MILES: Hey Beyers, are you back?
JULIAN DIBBELL: But he’s given me a good head start here. So from there we go to the
level of looking at possibly other phenomena, Open Source itself, emergent sort of play-
driven kinds of production. Another example is we had the fanciful one of x-ray diagnosis as
an MMO game, but we also have the actually functional one of Google creating this game
for tagging their images that works by having two people face off. They can’t communicate
with each other except by giving tags to an image that they’re looking at together and they

11. only get points if their tags, their descriptive tags, match.
So I see an image of Marilyn Monroe, I might type “Marilyn” but if it’s somebody in China
they won’t know what to type or if it’s somebody outside of the American orbit, they might
not know what to type. But we both might type woman or both might type blonde and we get
points. And the virtue of that is then we are applying tags. We are doing Google’s work of
identifying images that computers are not yet--at a level computers are not yet able to do.
And we’re doing it for fun.
Now, it’s a sort of drudge-like, tedious sort of fun in a couple levels down from Tetris, but
I’ve played this game and it is obnoxiously addictive, and I have never felt quite so dirty
spending an afternoon procrastinating on a game as when playing this, knowing that every
little moment of productivity that’s being stolen from me is going right to Google’s bottom
line. But there you go, it works. So this is an example of the ludic element of some of these
mechanisms, and it’s not necessarily being especially joyful.
BEYERS SELLERS: So let me, if I could--
JULIAN DIBBELL: You’re back. Okay, good.
BEYERS SELLERS: I’m finally back. I am back. So there’s actually a big literature in
behavioral economics on what’s called the crowding out effect, which is basically
experimental work showing that people will be glad to do things and then you pay them and
they are no longer glad to do them. It basically becomes, in their mind, work or a chore.

12. JULIAN DIBBELL: Right.
BEYERS SELLERS: My favorite study of all of these was run, I’m pretty sure, by George
Loewenstein at Carnegie Mellon’s Social Science group, where they had classes of
students and they would be told you can pay money to hear your professor read poetry or
the other group was told you can pay money to hear your professor read poetry. And what
ended up happening is, of course, it turned out people were generally happier to get money
than to have to pay money, but when they doubled the stakes, when they said either we’ll
pay you twice as much or--so when they said we’ll pay you twice as much, people didn’t
want to go. They actually were less likely to want to attend because they figured, “Well this
must be awful.” I think I have that right. And then, if they were paying and they doubled it,
people were like, “Oh this must be really cool, it must be fun, it must be fun.” So fun is not
something that we simply respond--it’s not some objective thing that’s just out there.
JULIAN DIBBELL: Exactly. And neither am I suggesting that this is a completely novel
phenomenon, right? You even have this in Mark Twain and Tom Sawyer getting the kids to
pay him to do his work for him--whitewashing the picket fence which, he convinced them,
was the funnest thing they could possibly do, and got them to pay him a nickel a--
BEYERS SELLERS: Now, Julian, one of the most interesting aspects, I thought, of your
book, Play Money, was when you talked about these different economists. You went
through sort of a historical progression, starting with Karl Marx and then Weber, and then
you talked about Huizenga--who’s not exactly an economist--and Turing as well. And I

13. understand that you have developed these thoughts so--the big phrase with Marx was “All
that is solid melts into air.” So can you just walk us through that progression?
JULIAN DIBBELL: Well, sure. I mean it sort of came more almost as an inner-voice when I
first laid eyes on the first gold farm I knew about. That was the phrase that came to my
mind--“All that is solid melts into air,” which is from the Communist manifesto and is Marx’s
way of summing up this kind of drive toward abstraction that’s built into capitalism.
Capitalism, as a mode of production, is always trying to look for the new, better way of doing
things, new, better way of arranging how things are made and done and sold. And so it’s
never so much interested in what exists as what could exist. So it has this kind of built-in
drive toward--the potential toward the virtual towards the abstract. And this is much
commented on in all kinds of social theory.
But when I first contemplated the gold farm, I was like, well, my God, this is about as
thorough a consummation of that prediction, really, as one could ever see, this sort of
completely fantasy world of production that nonetheless was completely plugged in to the
networks of global capitalism.
So that’s when I began to think on a sort of third level of generalization about this stuff. Not
only does it exist within online games and virtual worlds, undeniably, a kind of system of
production and virtual economy. Not only can it be seen seeping out into the global
economy as a potential new way of exploiting human energy but, in fact, maybe it has sort
of always been what capitalism is headed towards, and is heading towards, because there

14. is no ultimately--there is no realm of the human that is more thoroughly virtual or more
abstract than the world of play and of games. Because that’s a space in which we sort of
enact things according to whatever the imagination permits and whatever structures of rules
can channel.
So that’s how I started thinking along theoretical and political economical lines. And
immediately sort of I ran up against the limits of Marx, which is that he’s quite abstract
himself. And there are other thinkers who sort of round out the picture of capitalism’s
evolution, none better, I think, than Max Weber, who says, “Not only is capitalism this pure,
self-driven logic of economic development, it also is something that emerged in a particular
historic and cultural moment.” The origins of capitalism he traces to the Protestant
Reformation and Calvinism and this sort of built-in drive towards accumulation, work, labor
that is very serious, kind of labor-oriented towards piling up wealth that is unique and really
provides the initial accumulative impetus that makes capitalism possible and gets it rolling
and carries it along for many centuries.
But then he’s writing at the beginning of the 20th century--Max Weber is--and describing a
world in which that initial cultural, historical impulse has been kind of drained out of the
economic system. This drive that is internally driven that is about staying on the good side of
an angry god has been removed from the capitalist system and now it’s just--it is this self-
driving system. He calls it an “iron cage” and laments what has become of it. And almost
passingly at the end of his classic essay, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”
in which he develops these ideas says, “You know, the saddest thing is where it has most
developed--you look at places like United States, this original spiritual impulse has been

15. replaced by something more like the desire to play.”
And he’s very dismissive about this, but that made a light bulb in my head go off and think,
well, actually, where will capitalism go now that it has run out of this original impulse? Can it
just proceed under its own steam, or will it start to need to enlist the moral energies of
people in the ways that it originally did at its origins?”
And it’s hard to think of an easier way to incorporate that sort of self-driven impulse into the
capitalist system than with play, right? Because play, which, in a lot of ways is like religion
and ritual, is precisely that activity that motivates us internally. That’s the idea anyway. And
so that’s where Weber sort of fits in.
But Huizenga is important to talk about because, if you’re going to take this idea seriously,
you have to take play seriously. And Weber did not and Marx did not. And Huizinga, who
was a cultural historian from the ‘30s wrote a book called Homo Ludens, which is much
cited today by game studies people, but was really about more than games; he was about
the history of civilization itself and how play was really a foundational part of some of the
origins of things like the law and religion and modern systems of warfare.
And so you need that perspective, I think, to really begin to understand how transformational
play could be and how it could really step up to this job that capitalism might be requiring of
it. Now Turing comes in, I think--
BEYERS SELLERS: If I could, before you get to Turing, when I think of trying to come up

16. with moralistic foundations for capitalist behavior, a lot of arguments are more along the
lines of this is a rising tide, lifts all boats and is doing well by doing good and things like that.
Those seems like very serious, heavy ideas that we’re going to make society better and
that’s why we need to cut costs and improve efficiencies and all these things. But this
sounds like just such a different perspective.
JULIAN DIBBELL: It is a different perspective, but it’s not a completely marginal
perspective. More and more you have these fields of inquiry, like the whole discipline of
happiness studies. We can pile up "prosperity" forever and we can raise our boats forever
and ever, but what the happiness scholars, psychologists like Csíkszentmihályi and his sort
of followers, have found is that happiness is not necessarily about making money or
acquiring wealth--
BEYERS SELLERS: He’s the one with the theory of flow.
JULIAN DIBBELL: Of flow, yes, exactly--
BEYERS SELLERS: The assembly line worker who’s lost in cutting three seconds from his
task is actually experiencing a high level of--
JULIAN DIBBELL: Right. Is having a much more optimum experience of life than the
investment banker who’s just phoning it in. And there are all kinds of ways to pervert that
into a really reactionary don’t-worry-be-happy kind of argument. My point is that if you’re
going to enlist, if you want people to keep playing your game, the game of capitalism,
they’ve got to want to show up. And just the promise of making a more abundant world or

17. even making more money for themselves isn’t necessarily going to keep cutting it.
BEYERS SELLERS: I know we’re going to be running out of time so maybe we’ll leave
Turing for another day. I’d like to follow up just a little on that you talked about the promise
of abundance. Ted Castronova talked about the puzzle of puzzles and you had written,
about the benefit of creating artificial scarcities. So is that the idea, that, actually, we can
engage workers and present them with more fun by making their jobs more difficult, which is
certainly counter to the types of things we teach here at the Johnson School?
JULIAN DIBBELL: Well, on some level, yes, we don’t want to make people more miserable,
obviously. That goes without saying. But this is an idea that is sort of the fundamental
problem that anyone looking at what you’re calling Metanomics confronts. We have these
virtual worlds, these spaces, where we could make a world like any we might live in as
human beings. And why do these worlds not look like the utopias people have always
dreamt of, you know the Garden of Eden? Why does the fruit not simply fall into your hands
when you reach out your hand and everything is there for you? Why are there quests? Why
is there a grind? Why are there economies which depend on scarcity?
Well, there have been worlds, as Ted documented. There have been worlds that attempted
to just be--everything was there for you and they tend not to be that popular. They’re not
that fun. People need a certain amount of challenge and that, I think, is generalizable. It gets
onto hairy ground because then people start using these arguments to dismantle the welfare
state in all kinds of ways saying, “Well you know, people will be happier if you take away
their welfare check.”

18. BEYERS SELLERS: Yes, I can see that going the wrong way quickly.
JULIAN DIBBELL: Which isn’t necessarily where you want to go. And yet, when we have
people thinking about the nano-tech economy, where your clothes are made in a nano-
processor that’s installed next to your washer/dryer for basically nothing, it behooves us to
really contemplate how the economics of a truly physically abundant world would work.
BEYERS SELLERS: So in our closing moments I’d like to look at sort of the flip side. Most
of what we’ve been talking about today has really been people can be productive and
having fun and, in fact, they might not even know they’re being productive while they’re
having fun.
Now, there’s also a culture that people in Second Life are all too familiar with, people who
are willing to do hard work to cause grief to other people. And I understand you are
preparing to write a little on what I guess is called the “goon culture.” I’m wondering if you
can just, in the last couple of minutes that we have, tell us a little about that.
JULIAN DIBBELL: Well, this goes all the way back to the introduction you started with and
A Rape in Cyberspace which was the story of a Lambda Mu--a textual virtual world very life-
like actually. There had never been anything quite like Lambda Mu until Second Life came
along, and I think they’re still sort of together in their own little sui-generis. But it was the
original case of cyber rape. This character came in and people were hanging out in the
living room of Lambda Mu and enjoying themselves and he came in and emoted these sort

19. of forced violent sex acts.
And I told it from the community’s point of view. I told that story from the point of view of
what emerged in response to that transgression, first of all, talking about how important it
was to take seriously what had happened--as the transgression and, second of all, how
interesting it was to look at how the community organized around it and tried to set up ways
of dealing with community norms and transgression.
So that’s why Larry Lessig talks about that article when he talks about the origins of his
career in cyber law because you could see there people trying to deal with order and
disorder and how to arrange it. But lately, especially since there’s been recent cases of
“virtual rape” here in--lovely money shots on there Falk; thank you--there have been cases
here in Second Life of “virtual rape,” people going to the cops in Belgium and what have you
saying “This person raped me in Second Life.” And suddenly I’m fielding calls from
journalists saying, “Talk to us about this very serious problem of cyber rape and virtual rape
and all these awful things that people can do to each other in these worlds.” And suddenly
I’m in the position of saying, “Look. These people in Lambda Mu had a much more
sophisticated sense of what was being done to them and how to respond to it and, further
more, now that I think of it, probably the rapist himself had a more sophisticated idea of what
he was doing.” And I found that to be true talking to griefers. The goons are a rather more
sophisticated version of your average griefer. But I think what’s common to a lot of griefing
cultures is a sense of trying to get at exactly that line between taking the virtual world
seriously and taking it too seriously. They delight in catching people taking it too seriously
and the people who are being caught out don’t think they’re taking it too seriously, and

20. maybe they aren’t. But what’s interesting to me is how malleable that line is and how
contestable that notion is.
BEYERS SELLERS: So does your perspective give us a direction to go to try to deal with
griefing beyond simply giving people the security tools that they need to ban people and
boot people out?
JULIAN DIBBELL: Well, it might point in a direction towards dealing with a certain kind of
griefer, which is, simply, don’t give them the satisfaction that they’re looking for. Laugh them
off. But that’s a controversial discussion in itself.
BEYERS SELLERS: Okay. I believe that we are just about out of time so I apologize that
we didn’t get a chance to talk about a number of other things I was hoping that you would
have a chance to tell us about. But thank you so much for coming on to Metanomics and,
hopefully, this will be the beginning of a conversation, rather than the end of one.
JULIAN DIBBELL: I’d be glad to come back sometime. Thanks for having me.
BEYERS SELLERS: Wonderful. So everyone, this has been Julian Dibbell today telling us
about fun and ludo-capitalism. You can get his newest book, Play Money, now in
paperback, off Amazon or in your local bookstore, and you can also buy it right here in
Second Life and funnel more of that money, Lindens are _____ money, funnel that money
directly to Julian. So again, thank you very much and this is the end of today’s Metanomics
session.

21. 57 MILES: Okay, thanks everyone. Thanks Rob. Thanks Julian.
JULIAN DIBBELL: No, thank you. Sorry, I’ve got to run.
57 MILES: Yeah, no problem. You run, Julian. Thanks for coming.
JULIAN DIBBELL: All right. Bye-bye.
BEYERS SELLERS: Bye-bye. Yeah, thanks a lot. I’ll be in touch, Julian.
JULIAN DIBBELL: Okay.
[END OF AUDIO]
Document: unproofed_cor2004.doc
Transcribed by: http://www.hiredhand.com
Second Life Avatar: Transcriptionist Writer