Here's a fascinating insight into the economics of massively multiplayer online games. Having tried The Sims Online, I can understand some of the appeal, but these people are obsessed. Serious gamers run entire farms of machines playing automatically to generate income within an online game, that's then sold on Ebay for real money.

Behold: the gold farm. Twenty-one PCs, each running 20 or more sessions of Ultima Online, each session automated to exploit a 350,000gp-an-hour loophole in the UO economy. Shall we do the math? 20 x 20 x 350K x 24 hours a day = potential returns of over 3 billion gp (US$45,000) daily.

"...one man's attempt to get rich selling, literally, castles in the air."
Julian Dibbel's PlayMoney Blog [via Kottke.org]

The original article: The Unreal Estate Boom [Wired News]