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Not long ago, a 43-year-old Wonder Bread deliveryman named John Dugger logged on to eBay and, as people sometimes do these days, bought himself a house. Not a shabby one, either. Nine rooms, three stories, rooftop patio, walls of solid stonework - it wasn't quite a castle, but it put to shame the modest redbrick ranch house Dugger came home to every weeknight after a long day stocking the supermarket shelves of Stillwater, Oklahoma. Excellent location, too; nestled at the foot of a quiet coastal hillside, the house was just a hike away from a quaint seaside village and a quick commute from two bustling cosmopolitan cities. It was perfect, in short, except for one detail: The house was imaginary.
Equally unreal were the grounds the house stood on, the ocean it overlooked, the neighboring cities, and just about everything else associated with it - except Dugger himself, the man he bought it from, and the money he shelled out. At $750, Dugger's winning bid on the property set him back more than a week's wages and was, on the face of it, an astonishing amount for what he actually bought: one very small piece of Britannia, the fantasy world in which the networked role-playing game Ultima Online unfolds.
Yet there was nothing particularly unusual about the transaction. On any day you choose, dozens of Britannian houses can be found for sale online at comparable prices. And houses are just the start of it. Swords, suits of armor; iron ingots, lumber, piles of hay; tables, chairs, potted plants, magic scrolls; or any other little cartoon item the little cartoon characters of Britannia might desire can be had at auction, priced from $5 for a pair of sandals to $150 for an exceptionally badass battle-ax to $1,200 for a well-located fortress. A simple, back-of-the-envelope calculation puts the estimated sum of these transactions at $3 million per year.
Which in turn is just a fraction of the total wealth created annually by the residents of Britannia. For every item or character sold on eBay and other Web sites, many more are traded within the game itself - some bartered, most bought with Britannian gold pieces (a currency readily convertible into US legal tender at about 40,000 to the dollar, a rate that puts it on par with the Romanian lei). The goods exchanged number in the millions, nearly every one of them brought into existence by the sweat of some player's virtual brow. Magic weapons won in arduous quests, furniture built with tediously acquired carpentry skills, characters made powerful through years of obsessive play - taken as a whole, they are the GNP of Britannia.
Literally. Last year - in an academic paper analyzing the circulation of goods in Sony Online's 430,000-player EverQuest - an economist calculated a full set of macro- and microeconomic statistics for the game's fantasy world, Norrath. Taking the prices fetched in the $5 million EverQuest auctions market as a reflection of in-game property values, professor Edward Castronova of Cal State Fullerton multiplied those dollar amounts by the rate at which players pile up imaginary inventory and came up with an average hourly income of $3.42. He calculated Norrath's GNP at $135 million - or about the same, per capita, as Bulgaria's .
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