Martin Vander Weyer
Cable Transfers
Wildcat Currency: How the Virtual Money Revolution Is Transforming the Economy
By Edward Castronova
Yale University Press 265pp £17.99 order from our bookshop
This book is about the virtual or ‘wildcat’ currencies used in online games and payment systems, and how they might one day gain equality with the government-sponsored currencies of the ‘real’ world, or even supersede them. It’s a thesis that will appeal most to those who – like Edward Castronova, a professor of telecommunications and cognitive science at Indiana University and ‘an expert on the economies of virtual worlds’ – are already convinced that online gaming is at least as worthwhile a way of spending your day as, say, reading books or making things to sell. Those like your reviewer who have not yet made that leap of imagination will find it more problematic or even, I dare say, a touch tiresome.
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