In the end, Julian Dibbell didn't make it. But just barely.
Since last summer, Dibbell has boldly proclaimed on his blog that on April 15, 2004, he would "truthfully report to the IRS that my primary source of income is the sale of imaginary goods, and that I earn more from it, on a monthly basis, than I have ever earned as a professional writer."
For months, he's been buying and selling gold pieces, suits of armor and other artifacts from Ultima Online in an attempt to live up to his self-imposed challenge. He'd decided to measure his success or failure by comparing his monthly take as a broker of virtual goods against his best month as a writer. But tax day has now come and gone and Dibbell fell short, in the end, by just $683.
Still, Dibbell turned a profit of $3,917 in the last month, an annualized rate of about $47,000 in income. Not bad for trafficking in goods that don't even exist in the physical world.
"I feel proud that I came as close as I did," says Dibbell. "Obviously I lost the bet, but I proved that ... you can sort of come in from a cold start and make it a viable living."
Ed Castronova, an associate professor of economics at Cal State Fullerton, said he is impressed with what Dibbell achieved.
Like Dibbell, Castronova is a moderator of Terra Nova, a collaborative blog that covers issues surrounding virtual worlds, gaming and economies. In his Terra Nova posting Thursday, Castronova congratulated Dibbell for his efforts and pointed out that an annual salary of $47,000 is nothing to sneeze at. Indeed, he wrote, such a salary exceeds the national averages for dancers, museum curators and several other professions.
Dibbell is somewhat humbled by that fact.
"Look at the people I'm making more money than," he says. "Firefighters, drug counselors and teachers, for God's sake."
And Castronova, a frequent critic of the practice of buying and selling virtual goods in games like Ultima Online and EverQuest because such activity allows people to buy their way to a playing level that others have invested countless hours reaching, nonetheless says that Dibbell has demonstrated that what he was doing was no lark.
"It's been a debate: Can people really earn their living doing this?" Castronova says. "And the answer is, 'Heck yeah.' I knew it, but it was so nice that Julian actually did this, so that now when people ask (me) about it, I can say it's more than just my supposition.... It's a great contribution to research in this area for someone to actually try it. It took a lot of guts."
In any case, now that his challenge has come to its end, Dibbell is faced with the question of what to do next.
"I did start this thinking, 'Could this be a new career?'" he says. "And I found it's a job like any other, and who I am is a writer and not a businessman."
Thus, he is going to concentrate on a story he is currently developing for Wired magazine about intellectual property issues in Brazil, as well as shopping a book proposal he has worked up about his experiences as a broker of virtual goods.
Still, Dibbell knows that walking away from that role won't be easy, particularly because he still has thousands of dollars' worth of gold pieces and the like to dispose of.
"It's going to be hard, because I still have this inventory and because I'll have to be selling (it)," he says. "And I know that people are going to be coming to me, 'Hey, you want to buy this castle?' It's going to be like walking away from the drug world."
