Byline: BY JULIAN DIBBELL BANK NOTE BY MARTIN WOODTLI | WATERMARK AND PORTRAIT BY NOLI NOVAK

BROCK PIERCE DOMINATED THE $2 BILLION MARKET FOR SELLING VIRTUAL ARMOR, SWORDS, AND CURRENCY TO OBSESSED GAMERS. THEN HIS EMPIRE CAME TUMBLING DOWN. AGAIN.

For a long time, maybe a year and a half, the game was pretty much what remained of Brock Pierce's life: He would wake up, sit down at his computer, log in, and play. Thirteen dollars a month bought him around-the-clock access to this imaginary world, a place of perilous dungeons and enchanted woods where online gamers came together by the thousands in a never-ending quest for treasure. Some assumed the roles of dwarves or lizard-people; some were humans. Pierce would play for hoursas long as 24 hours without a breakslaying monsters, wresting precious coins and jewels and magic weapons from their corpses. Later, he added extra computers to his setup and taught himself to play as many as six characters at once, one per machine. After that he'd sit there in the glow of half a dozen monitors, hands flitting from keyboard to keyboard, eyes shifting from screen to screen, yet still, somehow, not finding time enough for all there was to accomplish in the game.

"There were times I came outside," he says, "and the sun hurt."

Pierce was 19 at the time and hardly the first young American male to step away from the sometimes painful light of reality for an extended, free-falling obsession with an online fantasy videogame. But it's safe to say that the reality he was shrinking from in 2000 was not that of a typical teen. At 16, Pierce had retired from a career as a modestly successful Hollywood child actor; by 18 he was a dazzlingly successful dotcom entrepreneur, living large on a $250,000 executive salary and the promise of millions more in post-IPO equity. By his 19th birthday he had lost it all. Pierce's high-profile startup had flamed out in a blaze of scandal that included accusations of sex with minors, and he and his cofounders had found it prudent to leave the US. He lived now in a rented house in a strange country, on the dwindling remains of a crash-ravaged stock portfolio.

And he played the game. You could call it solace: a way to fill the emptiness of failure with the curiously convincing sense of purpose that comes from steadily amassing a make-believe digital fortune in magic staves and platinum coins. But in time it would be more than that. Much more. Soon enough, amid the daily grind of his obsession, he would see in the game itself a way out of the bleak hole he had fallen into. He would take a clear-eyed, calculating look at what he and his fellow players had been doing all those monthsat the countless hours they'd given over to the pursuit of purely virtual but implacably scarce commoditiesand he would recognize it not just for the underexploited form of productivity it...