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Julian Dibbell is an accomplished and well-respected journalist. And while he usually works in relative anonymity, his latest deadline has a very public face.
"On April 15, 2004, I will truthfully report to the IRS that my primary source of income is the sale of imaginary goods," begins the proposition on his website, Play Money, "and that I earn more from it, on a monthly basis, than I have ever earned as a professional writer."
Dibbell is a trafficker – in the gold pieces, suits of armor, blades and other artifacts beloved by the often obsessive players of Ultima Online, many of whom wouldn't blink at paying $600 for magic gloves. But Dibbell's going to have to sell a whole lot of them if he's going to meet his goal, as Tax Day is just around the corner. (Although April 15 is the day tax returns and estimated taxes are due – not a date through which the IRS normally requires taxpayers to report their income – Dibbell is treating it as his cutoff date for earning most of his money from the sale of virtual goods.)
"I'm at the last month, and you know, I've got a shot, I think," he says. "I need to make another $3,600 in profit in three weeks. Twelve hundred bucks a week. We'll see."
Given his recent performance, he's going to have a hard time. On Play Money, he's posted regular portfolio updates, and in the most recent, he reported a weekly profit of $996.99. Not bad for selling a bunch of artfully arranged 1s and 0s. But maybe not enough to get him over the hump.
In some ways, Dibbell's share of the market in Ultima Online goods is barely worth mentioning. At any given moment, there might be more than $150,000 worth of such items for sale on eBay alone, where sellers justify their asking prices with statements like, "You are paying for time taken to acquire this item."
Ultima Online is hardly the only game that fosters large-scale secondary-market trading. Similar markets exist for games such as GemStone, Second Life and others, and there is even an online virtual currency exchange.
Ken Selden, a Hollywood screenwriter, made a splash a few years ago by becoming the first person to sell a million dollars' worth of virtual goods. And because he says that for years he made more selling virtual merchandise than he did writing scripts, he's not that impressed with Dibbell's proposition.
"I know many people who have made more than (they did at their regular jobs) in the buying and selling of virtual currency," Selden says. "So the number's not staggering."
Selden, however, had a previous career as an economist, whereas Dibbell did not. Indeed, Dibbell is a self-taught trader, having begun his Ultima Online obsession while he was writing an article on virtual economies for Wired magazine.
"I just found myself playing it and playing it, and not being able to stop," he remembers, "and I realized I either had to stop cold turkey or find a way to make this productive in a more meaningful sense. Also, as a married man, you need excuses to indulge in this stuff."
The buying and selling of virtual goods straddles a philosophical fence. Many players feel it's unfair for those with money to be able to buy whatever they want while others have to put in endless hours in front of their computers to acquire goods.
"It ... changes the nature of the experience for those involved if something that is intended as a challenge or accomplishment is able to be purchased," says Ron Meiners, a longtime observer of online gaming and communities. "Certainly in some communities, or games, the whole point is in the nature of the challenges and solving them."
Then again, many acknowledge that, short of spending a nearly unlimited amount of time playing games like Ultima Online, the only way to acquire the weapons, shields and gold required to participate at a high level is to buy them. Time is money, and people have differing amounts of each commodity.
At the same time, many games' terms of service specifically proscribe trafficking in their goods in secondary markets. Even Ultima Online's TOS says that its developers at Electronic Arts subsidiary Origin own all intellectual property related to the game.
But DebySue Wolfcale, Origin's director of marketing, explains that while the company doesn't publicly condone the markets in Ultima Online goods, it also doesn't have any problems with them.
"Even the people that are (buying and selling) for profit have an abiding love of UO," she says. "The only way you can actually make money doing that type of thing is to really know the game. How else would you know what's a good deal?"
More to the point, perhaps, Origin says that if it were to actively try to stop people from trading in UO goods, the game's growth could be stunted.
"I think it probably would," says Meiners. "These markets create a richer experience for many players.... The online experience is all about interactions. This creates more interactions. (And) those are more valuable than the intellectual property, at least in this case."
For his part, Dibbell is going to spend much of his time before April 15 devoted to his sales. Previously, he had sold mostly on eBay, but now he has set up his own store in an attempt to speed up the process.
"If you look at any of these people, the top sellers on eBay, who have sales of two and three and four times what I'm making already, they will tell you it's just 20 percent of what they actually do," Dibbell says. "The bulk of sales come from their own websites, and eBay is there as a kind of advertising for them."
Still, Dibbell's emporium hasn't been doing well yet, and he's having to face the possibility that, in the end, he may not live up to his challenge.
While he will be ecstatic if he's successful, he says he's been slowly preparing himself, and his readers, for that eventuality for some time.
"I think the whole blog is infused with a sense of melancholy and inevitable doom, so I don't think great shame will fall on me and my household if I don't make the numbers," he says. "I think of it as a game, and if I don't make the numbers, I will have lost the game, and it will feel crappy in that way."
