"Gold, he learned, was considered to be a reliable store of value because extracting it from the ground required a certain amount of effort that tended to remain stable over time. It didn’t take a huge amount of acumen, then, to understand that the value of virtual gold in the game world could be made stable in a directly analogous way: namely, by forcing players to expend a certain amount of time and effort to extract a certain amount of virtual gold."
Reamde is a science-fiction novel by Neal Stephenson, published in 2011. The story, set in the present day, centers on the plight of a hostage and the ensuing efforts of family and new acquaintances, many of them associated with a fictional MMORPG, to rescue her as her various captors drag her about the globe. Topics covered range from online activities including gold farming and social networking
"There was a common saying in the biz/tech world that “As hire As, and Bs hire Cs,” the point being that as long as you continued to recruit only the very best people, they would attract others, but as soon as you let your standards slip, the second-raters would begin to sign up third-raters to act as their minions and advance their agendas."
"Black/Arab with an unmistakable dash of Italian. No one would mistake her for a model, but she’d found a look. Richard could only conjecture what style pheromones Zula was throwing off to her peers, but to him it was a sort of hyperspace-librarian, girl-geek thing that he found clever and fetching without attracting him in a way that would have been creepy."
"The Walmart was like a starship that had landed in the soybean fields. … They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power."
"None of Seamus’ crew gave her more than a glance and a nod. They were intensely focused on their laptops: some sort of pitched battle. “Fuckers are trying to flank us on the left!” “Disengaging from the Witch King and pivoting to get your back.” …Fierce clicking and typing, punctuated by roaring, anguished laughter, as (Olivia guessed) each man’s character died in the game world. Planted around the dining area were plastic dolls: troll- or elf-like fantasy characters…Marked on the underside of each was the logo of Corporation 9592. So that answered the question she’d been afraid to ask, for fear of seeming like the stupidest person in the whole world: Are you playing T’Rain?"
"“I notice you’re not referring to him as ‘the little fucker’ anymore,” said Corvallis. “Okay, okay, he stopped being a little fucker when he raised an army of twelve hundred high-level characters and deployed them in battle array around his projected route of advance,” Richard admitted. “I have to admit I was wondering why he was taking so long to move away from that cave. I didn’t reckon that he was going to set the whole thing up like Sherman’s march to the sea.” “Did you notice his leapfrogging cavalry screens?” “Yes, I fucking noticed them.”"
"“The American national security apparatus is very large and unfathomably complex,” was all that Uncle Meng would say. “It has many departments and subunits that, one supposes, would not survive a top-to-bottom overhaul. This feeds on itself as individual actors, despairing of ever being able to make sense of it all, create their own little ad hoc bits that become institutionalized as money flows toward them. Those who are good at playing the political game are drawn inward to Washington. Those who are not end up sitting in hotel lobbies in places like Manila, waiting for people like you.”"