Notes
1. I went to China on assignment from the New York Times Magazine, researching an article published later, in the magazine's June 17, 2007, issue, as “The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer”. Throughout the trip I had the invaluable assistance of Ge Jin, a Shanghai native who, at the time, was working on a documentary about the gaming factories as a project in the UC San Diego graduate communications program.
2. Leihtiniemi, Tuukka. “How Big Is the RMT Market Anyway?” Virtual Economy Research Network. March 2, 2007. Retrieved February 6, 2008, from http://www.virtual-economy.org/blog/how_big_is_the_rmt_market_anyw
3. Castronova, Edward. Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier. Social Science Research Network. December 2001. Retrieved February 6, 2008, from http://ssrn.com/abstract=294828
4. Dibbell, Julian. Recalculating the Global Virtual GDP, Yet Again. Terra Nova. June 26, 2007. Retrieved February 6, 2008, from http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/06/recalculating-t.html
5. Marx, Karl (1969). Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (p. 111). New York: International Publishers.
6. I have borrowed the term from Ge Jin, who used it to describe the gold farmers’ on-the-job play in a talk given at University of California, San Diego, February 8, 2007.
7. In this and all my conversations with the gold farmers, Ge Jin served as interpreter.
8. Searle, John (1980). Minds, Brains and Programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3 (3), 417–457.
9. Turing, Alan (1950, October). Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind, LIX (236), 433–460.
10. Yee, Nick. The Blurring of Work and Play. The Daedalus Project. July 9, 2004. Retrieved February 6, 2008, from http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/print/000819.php
11. Söderberg, Johan (2007). Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement. New York: Routledge.
12. Sutton-Smith, Brian (1997). The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
13. Pearce, Celia (2006). Productive play: Game culture from the ground up. Games and Culture, 1(1), 17–24.
14. Malaby, Thomas M. Anthropology and Play: The Contours of Playful Experience. Social Science Research Network. December 12, 2008. Retrieved February 6, 2008 from http://ssrn.com/abstract=1315542
15. Malaby, Thomas M. (2007). Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games. Games and Culture, 2 (2), 95–113.
16. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2004). Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies. Common Knowledge, 10 (3), 463–484 (p. 467).
17. Marx, Karl (1964). The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Ed. and intro. Dirk J. Struik. Trans. Martin Milligan. New York: International Publishers.