Tremblant Lifestyle

Land is the one thing we aren’t making any more of, right? Aside from feats of engineering (like the Central Japan International Airport), it’s true, and as the planet’s population climbs and available land remains static, territory will only get more valuable. As Delmar O’Donnell said in O Brother, Where Art Thou, “You ain’t no kind of man if you ain’t got land.” While it remains often prohibitively expensive, even to the worlds “haves” (depending on where you want it), there may be an alternative for the aspiring yet pocket-light would-be real estate mogul: virtual real estate.

Feel like owning your own island? Want acres of sprawling land to do with as you please, not even bound by the laws of physics? Numerous massively multiplayer online games involve persistent worlds and terrain, with some containing millions of users in a static virtual space. Many of these games offer a land-ownership system to add a new dimension of gameplay. If you can’t afford land in real life, or if the subprime mortgage crisis has you in a heel hook, your best bet might be online. But are we talking apples and oranges here? Is a virtual house about as satisfying as a virtual girlfriend?

A Bit of History

I’ve been gaming for decades, but my first experience with what could be called virtual housing/land ownership was in Origin’s Ultima Online. Basically, there were two “worlds”: Felucca, where players can kill each other and monsters, and Trammel, where player vs player was kept friendly, as a safe(r) environment for cooperative monster battling. While housing was available in Felucca from the start, it was only implemented in Trammel later on. Each player had the opportunity to set up a house on a spot of what was once neutral land, able to buy only a single deed to keep things relatively fair. Your deed was a template house of a pre-defined size (the isometric view meant for an easy tile-based dimension system). The more money you have, the bigger the deed. If my memory serves me well, there were only seven spots of flat land able to accommodate the largest “house”, the castle (per “shard”/server). The moment housing went live in Trammel, a land grab frenzy crashed the planet for hours, soon after resulting in a house in every usable spot in the game.

UO had a well-developed list of available in-game items, with a range of rarity generally defined as a function of spawn rate, in most cases. Exceptions include game bugs that, when resolved, result in rarer than rare items. The implementation of housing allowed for a showcasing platform for weathered gamers who had done the monster rounds, who were now content to socialize, sitting in their houses accepting compliments for their virtual vernissage of rare game items. Locked down and (for the most part) unable to be pocketed by passers-by, the items became the virtual equivalent of knick-knacks and trinkets that adorn real life display cases in real life homes: equally devoid of utility, equally fit to offer packrat satisfaction and show-off appeal. In that sense, the virtual home did fulfill a genuine home function, but remained categorically distinct from the basic value of a real world living space. Or did it?

Virtual Value, So to Speak

While your imagination can be stretched to conclude that your avatar lives in its virtual house, it can hardly be realistically concluded that you, the player, in any way, live in that house. And here, then, the standard criticisms: it doesn’t offer you shelter, a place in which to raise a family, to genuinely consider a home more than a house. Evaluating virtual objects (and places) tends to be problematic, highlighting the various satisfying elements within as we realize what’s kept, and what’s lost. In his work as a pioneer in the study of virtual economies, most specifically Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, Edward Castranova does well to carry the solidly real-only skeptic into the world of virtual value, stressing the elements above and beyond what you can hold in your hand to fundamental social and personal value attributions. Those elements may just be enough to make virtual land ownership satisfying, depending on how we are to define land and land ownership, and how much personal stake we place in the elements that don’t overlap between land’s real and virtual versions. To highlight just how lost we are on the matter with our available language as our barometer for competency, we don’t yet have a word for the non-virtual besides “real”, wholly saturated in touch-bias.

As is the case with Ultima Online, a great deal of value in virtual space is social, contrary to pre-conceptions about the faux-social environments that many claim virtual worlds engender. There is a very real sense in which home ownership in EA’s The Sims does satisfy, especially as it indulges the home-decorator type (independent of whether the decoration was preceded by monster-slaying or not). But a house isn’t as valuable, doesn’t really become real estate, without the surrounding market, and the validation that that conscious market provides. Hence, The Sims Online.

The Current Markets

The most buzzing virtual real estate market is undoubtedly within the spaces of Second Life, the multi-million-strong community of virtual world citizens carving out lives, socializing, being entertained, and earning a living massively online. Land ownership (and, specifically, the tantalizing prospect of island ownership) was a big part of the game’s draw, offering a slice of land to paying player, and the prospect of much more, with some investment. And many are investing, in, and out, of Second Life. In the game Project Entropia, in 2005, a 23-year-old gamer aliased Deathifier recouped his £13,700 virtual real estate investment within a year. That’s really the bottom line of virtual value. There are two main types of general value: personal (as a function of nostalgia/formed memories, and general ownership satisfaction), and public (as a function of scarcity, communal validation, and social use). Virtual objects (and land) do well to achieve real value, with remarkable little sacrifice. If the virtual game is worth playing, the virtual objects and land within are worth owning, valued most notably as it relates to time of acquisition within a psychologically validated social/metaphysical framework.

The table below shows a breakdown of the general housing options available in MMOGs. Only Second Life allows you to really expand and become a virtual real estate mogul, while the others would require tedious multiple accounts. Other games offering massive land ownership will surely follow, but as it stands now, Second Life is your ticket to mogulhood.

How to Know if Virtual Real Estate is Right for You

While Second Life doesn’t do enough to satisfy the real gamer in me, it does tickle my land-ownership bone. But I need a lot of tickles before I giggle. If you’re wondering how to calculate whether virtual real estate is right for you, consider the following summary.

From a housing community standpoint, if you’re willing to perform the mental leap and try to take virtual real estate somewhat categorically similar to real real estate, there is a large community of people who are willing to do the same. Value is a flexible thing, and context is huge.

Step 1.

Let’s try some pseudo-mathematics:

What % of legitimate home enjoyment do you think you can garner from a virtual domicile? There are two general kinds of answers, here. 0%, which represents someone who finds this concept ridiculous and in a categorically different place in their heads, and 0<%, representing those willing to consider virtual real estate vs real real estate as apples and oranges, but still fruit. If you’re willing to entertain the comparison, you’re all set.

Step 2.

Consider the costs. In Second Life, you can get 4,096 sqm for $25 USD per month (check here for the full price list). Since buying real land can be a one-time payment, let’s multiply out five years of that amount of land, costing a whopping total of $1,500 USD. Decent land in central Illinois (well, why not Illinois) can run you in the ballpark of $10,000/acre (4,046 sqm). So, comparing costs, an acre in second life costs 15% of what it costs for land in Illinois. If you answered more than 15% in step one, then virtual land might be for you. If Illinois isn’t your bag, do the math for the percentage cost for wherever you want, and see how your enjoyment figures stack up. The math’s a bit fuzzy, and there are other factors to consider (like real world taxes, or game subscription fees ($9.95 USD/month for Second Life)) but it gives some kind of perspective.

A lot of life’s enjoyment is driven by our minds and less by the things we enjoy themselves. Virtual objects and property remind us of just how fabricated our value system is. Heck, isn’t money itself an abstract construction? Before condemning the virtual as pointlessly unreal, remember that the mind, and enjoyment, are strange things that can be played with.