I came around to Halting State in a Highly Unusual Manner. See, I've actually been involved in a 'heist' through a MMORPG. Unfortunately, unlike as depicted in the book - a guild of orcs storming he bank - the truth is far more mundane, and also 'interesting'. It involved generating 'rollbacks' through glitching the client/server protocols, using a lot of
'friends' to help out overload server response times, and then shifting the massively duplicated goods to a number of unrelated player accounts. I made enough money out of it to live on for a few weeks. I didn't need the money, I was involved in a guild who existed to hack MMOs in general, just for the challenge. The security hole was plugged within a few days. Then it was off to see what we could do to the PVP system. It was a lot of fun at the time.

My one caveat with this book is that most of the critics and commentators are saying 'this is the near future'. It's not. If you know where to look and who to hang out with -- most of the 'tech' elements of the story are NOW. LARPS are for weirdos IMHO, but sign me up for SPOOKS 2.0.

Can you imagine it? "Osama B. Laden, you just got PWNED!"