Last Wednesday, I attended “Buy Buy Art“, a symposium dealing with the ambiguous relation between art and capital. Venue of choice was the cultural centre Vooruit in Ghent. I had only been notified the night before that Julian Dibbell had been scheduled as one of the speakers during this event. Julian has been following and reporting on life within virtual worlds since the early 90’s. Apart from being a freelance writer for Wired and the New York Times, he is also the author of ‘My Tiny Life’ and the more recent ‘Play Money – Or How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot’ (the latter didn’t exactly go unnoticed during the symposium, mainly thanks to a limited edition of the book, folded and manually bound by the author himself…).
I dedicated the previous post to ‘Deeper’, John Seabrook’s report of his escapades in the virtual community of The Well in ’92 –’94. Julian Dibbell’s ‘My Tiny Life’, though only published in 1998, is an equally interesting account of another text based virtual community of that era, LambdaMOO.
For those interested in reading it right here, right now, the book can now be downloaded for free from his personal site at www.juliandibbell.com
Julian’s presentation during the symposium was a brief introduction to virtual worlds, with an emphasis on virtual economies. Topics ranged from Ted Castronova’s (now almost legendary) essay on the GNP of Everquest II to the goldfarmer’s phenomenon in China. Nothing new for those who have been following the developments of virtual worlds over the past couple of years, but I did have the feeling it was a very captivating, new topic for the majority of the attendees. Always a good reality check, especially now that some narrative decisions for the film have to be made. It’s crucial not to take things for granted. No matter how fast virtual worlds are evolving, no matter how many scholars are devoting their time and thoughts on new research and no matter how deep blog communities like TerraNova might delve: at the end of the day, we’re still dealing with a topic a lot of people have never heard anything about, the occasional media attention on Second Life or game addiction aside.
The next day, we met Julian for an in-depth interview, which, I am convinced, will become another major contribution to the film. And for a change, it sure was fantastic to do an interview on my own turf. I wonder when the first conference on virtual worlds will find its way to Belgium?
