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Second Life Virtual Property Boom
The Guardian Gamesblog has an interview with Philip Rosedale, Second Life's CEO and Founder. In the wake of last week's virtual property slaying, they discuss the realities of owning something intangible. From the article: "We launched Second Life without out of world trade and after a few months we looked at it and thought, 'We're not doing this right, we're doing this wrong.' We started selling land free and clear, and we sold the title, and we made it extremely clear that we were not the owner of the virtual property. USD$.4m a month is traded directly to world markets in Linden Bucks on Gaming Open Market. That's USD$.4m redeemed, or Linden Bucks turned into US dollars. In May 2005, the total amount traded in-world was USD$1.47 million. There were 1.3 million transactions between 19,500 unique users."
Actually I have several dozen, in any shade that you choose.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
So you give them money for land (Lets say 1 block) and they keep said money and give you this block of data.. then.... they keep your money and..?
This is one huge ass scam type deal, yet totally legal and ingenius. Even if someone goes "No thanks, I'd like to sell you the land back, can I have my money please" they still get the intrest in the long turn and make a profit.
It's like selling magic beans, either way they win..
I like muppets.
When I read about "virtual real estate" I can't help but think of the
character who played Woody Allen's father in Love and Death and his
"valuable piece of land".
What's next? Virtual commodities trading?
Yes, I understand it's primarily for entertaihnment value, but somewhere
in Marketing (insert preferred afterlife here), a large group is laughing
themselves silly.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
and buy the virutal properties before the bubble burst.
virtual loser boom!
second life?
no thanks, i still have to get my first one!
in soviet russia.. virtual properties sell you!
I'm a merchant in this venue. I sell clocks! Take a look! I make about USD 50 each week. It's good spending money for any kid, just for having fun for about 3 hours a day.
In the case of dot.bomb we had a bunch of non-viable businesses and ideas with no effective business plan that could not stand up to scrutiny. Unfortunately a lot of other viable ideas/businesses got burnt too.
The same goes for pyramid selling schemes. While there are new suckers/members to join up and fuel the system everything is great. Once the sucker/member fuel runs out they crash.
I recall a business selling Kruger Rands about 15 years ago. A Kruger Rand is just a minted ounce of gold, so has the tangible value of an ounce of gold. This crowd, however made a business of adding an enhanced value based on the condition and minting marks, coining phrases like bloom, sheen etc. Some coins sold for 5 to 10 times their tangible value. Eventually this bust and many people got burnt.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Was it just me or was TFA riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes? (Besides being rather boring?)
Just wait until they try to wind it down and suddenly the lawsuits start flying for willful destruction of property.
Isn't that the whole point behind MMORPGs NOT allowing actual ownership in-game? Since if there's a server wipe or something they have no obligations to the players to return all their houses/loot?
This is my post. See sig above ^
Ahem, Derivatives.
From the link:
The fundamental nature of a derivative is that unlike a bond, as in a Treasury bond, or a stock, or even physical stock or commodity (ie: some raw material, product), a derivative has no physicalistic purpose or reason for existence.
In essence, you can make bets on commodities and futures; i.e. virtual commodities trading.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I'm sure the virtual government will intervene to prevent the virtual economy from collapsing if the virtual real estate bubble does a virtual pop. There's nothing worse than losing your virtual shirt when owning virtual real estate in the virtual world.
This reminds me a lot of website property.
A company -- say, Amazon.com -- owns the title to a website. They have rights to the property at http://www.amazon.com/ . But the actual bits on the server don't have to reside on computers owned by Amazon; they could hire a hosting company to do that.
That's what's going on with Second Life. The video game is hosting the "site", and they're licensing rights to areas of the "site" to individual people.
Come to think of it, it also reminds me of an IPO. But instead of selling ownership, Second Life is selling rights to its product. I don't see anything wrong with this whatsoever.
Fax Baba!
This is no big deal. Are the people who buy paintings for way too much money losers too?
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Everyone gets weirded out when you mention the idea of "intangible" property, yet few people have any qualms about paying bills online, using credit cards, or otherwise using money that they never see. Few get upset when they buy/download software that is just as intangible as the goods in an online game.
So is it really the intangible property that weirds people out? Or the fact that the general media has no damn clue how online games work?
With so many ppl on
So this is like RL all over again? I play games to escape from reality, if rich kids can have all the cool eq/chars/whatever in the game as well, what does that leave me with? I might as well be a poor loser somewhere where I don't have to pay money.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
I think we may be missing something here. The power of the notion of land ownership. In some societies, namely China, Japan, the Phillpines, the idea of land ownership is beyond fathoming for many people, who can otherwise afford broadband and computers.
To them, the notion that land "exists" in the virtual world connects to their ideas of self-worth in a very tangible way.
Emotional knee-jerk reactions aren't that interesting.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Selling intangible property is more similar to offering to shovel somebody's driveway for cash, than to selling your old stereo. That the item is neither tangible nor permanent makes it no less legitimate. (However, I would never pay real money for RTS property.)
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I have not played this MMORPG but have played many others. Paying for things in these games may seem insane to you. But once you get addicted and start putting in a few hours a day, $5 for the uber sword of death or some land seems very reasonable.
On the other hand it can turn the game into a "only those with more money have fun" type of thing... Well I guess they are trying to make it more like real life.
servers cost money, someone has to pay
P2P.
Of course, to prevent cheating, you have to have multiple nodes "managing" each region, and which region nodes are "managing" they should have no say over (assigned via kademlia, a small assignment server, or whatever; the IP must be the critical factor, however, so that the user cannot sign in and out to try and get new regions). Having multiple nodes managing each region increases the bandwidth involved as well, as the client has to verify that multiple (probably four, so that there's three even if one drops out) separate data streams are consistant, and commands need to stream out to those three nodes (the nodes further need to sync with each other occasionally). If controlling nodes drop below three, the region should be unavailable until a new node comes back on.
There are other complications as well. Machines may have their CPU/bandwidth capability change midway and have to be assigned a smaller region to manage (with other nodes having to take up the slack, but still not getting to choose what they get), etc. "Updates" and new regions would need to propagate on their own, but be signed by a trusted authority. Etc. However, it certainly seems to be a doable concept.
Did he just go crazy and fall asleep?
Gee, I think this clock reminds me of something, but I can't say what. Shame.
...that's a beowulf cluster of servers...
Second Life is an online game of a whole different sort. You see, the vast majority of the content in the game is player created. As a subscriber, you have the ability to upload textures and sounds. You can create objects in the game and put the textures on the objects. You can program in a proprietary scripting language using a provided API that gives you access to the game's particle system, accounting system, and the game world itself.
The backbone of this economy is the Linden Dollar (L$). Each subscriber gets a weekly stipend of it as part of the package, plus you can trade real money for L$ on the open market. Players create and consume content in the game. For example, some people spend all of their time creating avatar clothing textures (using Linden-provided texture template) and selling copies of them to other players. The ones that make the best clothes make the most bank. Other people (LOTS of other people) re-invent the slot machine or various casino games over and over again and rake the money gambled with the game's they've created. Some people create new games on their own (like one called Tringo that's very popular these days) and license them. Tringo can be played for free, but it takes a lot of land to host a game and organizations that collectively own huge tracts of land and use them as malls use Tringo and like games to attract shoppers.
In other words, the game is just nothing but the foundation upon which an economy can form. One formed there, and Second Life's creators deserve to be lauded for that.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
Is owning virtual property any different than owning any other sort of software? When you pay $800 for photoshop, you get a long series of ones and zeros that end up performing some function. When you buy virtual real estate, you're buing the right to do something with a similar long series of ones and zeros which perform some function (entertainment).
While I personally wouldn't spend money on either product, I can understand how some people would. What we need to do is to make sure they realize that all the rules are set by the company, it is definately *not* like real-world real estate.
This scheme seems stupid, but realize that all they have done is virtualized money. Like poker chips. Now, why would somebody want to use this sort of money? How many of those reasons are legal?
Sod slaying a dragon and possibly dying.
Let me cut these landowners lawns in game!
> wield flymo
You are now wielding a flymo.
> kill grass
You attack the grass with your blade of cutting. You hit! Grass loses 2"
Grass attacks you! You get some mushy grass on your boots.
You attack the grass with your blade of cutting. You hit! Grass loses 1"
Grass is cut!
You earn $5.
>
For all their stability, dollar bills are intangible. They are linked to no set physical item of value. Even when the country was on the gold standard it did not have enough gold to back all the dollars in the economy.
As for bubbles, the stability of the worth of something (whether its U.S. $ or LindenDollars) depends on the sustainability of the economy (e.g., the extent that its not a Ponzi scheme) in terms of both the materials being traded and the participants. Even real-world tangible goods have no guarantee of stable value. For example, some would argue that real estate in the U.S. is currently a bubble and that the true value of what seems like a very tangible good has become inflated.
The point is that all economies, both virtual and real, are about intangibles defined by people's relationships to each other and to items of reputed value. A dollar is only worth what someone else will trade for it. A block of land or uber sword of death is only worth what someone else will pay for it. Even tangible objects (e.g., a brick of gold) only has value to the extent that others will trade gold for other desirable goods such as food. Value is in the eye of the beholders, both buyer and seller, and has no other value than that. At best, the values of different items may become fixed relative to each other (but not on any absolute scale) becuase of the ability to transform one item (e.g., labor) into another item (e.g., attained goods in a game or in real life).
Economies and the notion of value are a human invention. As such, the dynamics of societies guarantee that even the most tangible of goods can fluctuate in value.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
P.S. Does anybody have any kittens up for adoption to a good home?
A: funhi.com
Buy animated GIF icons of real things for real cash to "give" to other members of the site, in hopes of attracting them.
I can't believe I still work at a normal job knowing this kind of easy money is out there.
I would honestly like to know...for whom is "$.4m" easier to understand than "$400,000?" Is that even what it means?
Too bad it is not useful to anyone since it is lacking a point.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
What is particularly scary about virtual property in a massive multiplayer is that the good is so completely unlinked to reality that virtually anything could burst the bubble. An executive in the company hosting is accused of embezzlement -- *pow*. The hosting company enters Chapter 11 -- *pow*. A new fad massive multiplayer starts up -- *pow*.
This is why the comparisons against derivatives are misguided. True derivatives are not physical things, but still, an option to buy pork bellies at a certian price in the future will not become worthless without pork bellies themselves becoming worthless. Whereas property on Second Life can become worthless for an infinite set of reasons.
I believe that the idea of objectively valuable virtual property, as explored by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash (The Street), will someday become a reality. But not until: (1) hosting the massive multiplayer is distributed among organizations that can't go bankrupt; (2)the massive multiplayer is either continuously upgraded or technology independent (perhaps a standard forum that will be interpreted in different ways depending upon the users client; (3) the massive multiplayer somehow guarantees scarcity, at least of more and less desirability property (perhaps by having a hotspot located near the hubs where avatars log on as seen in Snow Crash); (4) accounts are protected by really, really, really good user authentification programs (or else victims of a dictionary attack could lose 20k over night); (5) at least some of the user base is able to access the universe of the massive multiplayer in a thorougly immersive way.
I think it's just a matter of time before these conditions are met, and spending real money on virutal property starts to make sense. But I don't think we are there yet, and those who are looking at virtual property less as a game and more as an investment are playing with tulip bulbs.
Moiche
It does seem a bit odd after all with processing power/storage growing the way it is, the same computer that can generate say 800sq miles of linden land today will be able to generate a much larger sized plot tomorrow, how does that factor into the equation ?
Also it would be more altruistic if they allowed you to host your own server with your own land that you can control who can visit. That way people who provide their own server get the benefit of not having to pay maintenance fees (they would still pay for the software, developers have to eat I agree, being one myself).
Think of it this way many games i.e. Quake, Counterstrike have worked for years by providing networking functionality and people create their own servers etc.
Granted MMO networks need to be much larger and persistent, though why can't they take the BitTorrent approach. Rather than have one central bank of many powerful servers, all computers running the game could connect together to form an adhoc grid with just as much computing power if not more. This would negate the huge maintenance costs required and hence the need for monthly fees. Which is where I see the sinister part, it's like saying rather than lets look for a better solution, lets look for the most expensive solution.
There were plenty of qualms when credit and debit cards first started gaining popularity. Hernando De Soto mentions in Mystery of Capital that Europeans were totally weirded out by Marco Polo's accounts of the Chinese using paper money. Marx was weirded out by another intangible property of assets: capital.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
When we were developing the idea we read a lot of books and were inspired by Hernando DeSoto's The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else.
I would have been interested to hear more about how they included De Soto's ideas in their game.
From the comments on the review of Mystery of Capital, I got the impression a lot of Slashdotters totally missed De Soto's point. He doesn't advocate for or against capitalism in the book. He argues for making existing capitalist economies more inclusive. De Soto describes a method for cracking the "bell jar" that insolates the rich and excludes the poor.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
Like one of the comments posted on the article, I also wondered what happens 10 years down the line when the company goes out of business, or the game is no longer profitable and is shut down?
I guess consumerism has reached it's logical conclusion. How long before companies start selling us our own thoughts and emotions? I guess they already have, in indirect forms (entertainment/media). Meanwhile in the real world, millions of people die every year of starvation and disease.
Virtual property is a way for China to completely destroy America's economy. Labor can be directly converted into property, without regard to physical limits, or even investment capital (except living expenses to grow a person to about 14 years). A hundred million Chinese play-workers playing games for property which they sell to American gamers too lazy to play-work for it themselves will sap the Americans' money quickly. And when the Chinese mafia government prioritizes MMORPG development, with their vassal industrialists running the servers, there will be plenty of inside jobs. Just like the Roman Empire outlawed much trade with the more productive Indus valley to keep their trade imbalance under control, America's economy could be threatened by removing all limits to American dollars flowing to China for virtual property that doesn't increase American productivity.
--
make install -not war
You mean like, say, music ? Or software ? Or anything else defined by "intellectual property" laws ?
Hey, MORAN, if you are going to criticize, make sure you're right first. DUMBASS.
And YES, they are obviously used to hedge, BUT THEY AREN'T ANYTHING. There is no underlying commodity.
Whatever; everyone on slashdot is a moron. Excuse me, Moran. 'Cept for me, that is.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I say what is next is a server crash, although Linden will bill it as a natural disaster.
Next time, pony up for the insurance!
Get your Unix fortune now!
had lots of players in their play-by-mail turn-based games, some players would sell - for cash US dollars - tribe assets that they "harvested" for you.
In fact, in Tribes of Crane (TOC), maybe it was TOC II, a group of indie players formed the Celtani Federation and went up against people who used USD to max out their tribes and crush us.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Should virtual property be treated as real? It's moot; what's happened in common law is that it's been determined to be real. Case closed.
I hate when people sum up complex and unresolved issues with flat statements like this. Saying something is worth money and calling "real" are two different things. There's a long legal history of acknowledging that intangibles can have monetary value. It's nothing new, and it's a far cry from a sweeping declaration that virtual property is real. Virtual property is a form of scorekeeping, no more or less real than points in a football game. The main difference is presentation. You could build a football scoreboard that showed each team's score in terms of a furnished house with more or less furniture in it, but that wouldn't make the furniture real. You could even make it legal for players to accept payments outside of the game to score points, like they do in online games. That would make the furniture worth money, but it still wouldn't make it real.
Of course, once one of your bridges is erected and in service it will never need to be replaced nor maintained. The market for bridges will dry up. This, I think, is one of the flaws in this model of selling items in these game worlds.
When I buy a t-shirt, 10-15 years later it's quite likely to have deteriorated to the point where it is no longer able to perform its job well. Likewise a car, or indeed a bridge, though each with a different average lifespan. Real items get broken, lost or even just worn out. When I buy a "car" in Second Life, I own and can use that car. That car will work forever and the game (presumably) makes it quite hard for me to lose it. Assuming no artificial barriers are erected to prevent it, there's no technical or physical reason why I can't duplicate and resell copies of that car.
The economy in these worlds is driven by novelty. The only reason I'd buy a new car is because the creator has done something wacky that can't be done by my existing car purchases. Eventually a point will be reached where no more innovations are possible, because all of these virtual worlds have their limits. I understand that Second Life's are less limiting than most, but given that it's been going for a few years now I'd expect that players have done just about everything that can be done with cars. Once there is no more room for novelty, there will be no point in buying anything. Everyone will own everything they could possibly want, and have no reason to replace any of it. The "exchange rate" beween their in-game currency and real-world currencies will suffer. Items will be so widespread that there is no scarsity to warrant non-trivial prices.
I hope no-one that is currently drawing a wage out of their activities in Second Life is relying on that lasting.
Does the web exist? :)
Is "web developer" not an acceptable job?
Why should a $30,000 government contract that uses Second Life as its development platform be any less real?
SL is not an MMORPG... there are no experience points, mages, fighters or clerics... the skills you need and the skills you gain are very real. Like Photoshop, Poser, and programming.
If you have ever used a game engine like Torque, it's more or less the same, except you have an instant audience who's more than willing to throw money at you for the content you produce.
People are forgetting one thing: in this game, the game creators are basically gods. Even if they promise to not change anything on the perfectly located beachfront property with gold mines and AI bikini girls, there's nothing that can stop them from making a hundred more islands with identical property when they feel the need to squeeze a bit more cash out of the game. Or what if they release an expansion with new content that makes assets in the old game worth almost nothing in comparison? People who have played Everquest for a moderate amount of time will know what I'm talking about. When the game was first released, a rare sword from the bottom of a high level dungeon was something everyone wanted to get. A few expansions later, it became completely worthless, not because anything about that item or the difficultly in getting it changed, but because equivalent and better weapons were easily gotten in the new areas from the expansions. Having not played Second Life, I can't say that example directly applies to the game, but it does illustrate the omnipotent amount of power that the game designers have over your property and its worth.
It's scary to rip into someone because they've committed a crime no more serious than enthusiasm.
Error: sentence cannot be parsed. abort, retry ignore?
I for one welcome our fake life millionare overlords...
Get your Unix fortune now!
Hi, how's everything way up there above the rest of humanity!
There actually is a tangible aspect to virtual property...the time and effort used to produce the property. The theory of labor pretty much sees the amount of labor needed to produce a good as the major component of the price. The price of gold is largely determined by the amount of effort it takes to get find and get more gold.
The reason virtual property is a bad investment is that the people who define the virtual world can change the rules and change the time needed to create goods. People in power changing the rules happens all the time in the real world too.
BTW, I doubt you will find any investment tool that does not have legions of people telling stories of how they were burned by their investment.
If I'd known about all this, I'd have signed up months ago.
While these things are small potatoes now, I can just see this being extremely useful for REAL (not virtual) money laundering. What a perfect setup.
When that goes big time, it will be interesting to see the real government try and stop it.
what's the opening bid?
o oks&r=f/
Snooks
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sn
What I think will happen is that they will eventually release the software in open source and only keep control of the money (while allowing others tp provide their own currency of course). This would answer (1).
I don't think (2) is an essential aspect, the first functionnal system will automatically become the de-facto standard anyway.
(4) is a problem, but in the absence of a totally secure solution, the $ value of virtual property will simply be lower to reflect the risk. ie. just like it is now.
I don't know what you mean exactly by (5), the game is already fairly popular with over 30k users and still growing. Progress is obviously to expect in that area, but I don't think it is the limiting factor for now.
Some people seem to be misunderstanding the dynamics here. Users rent land from Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, and in return get to control that plot of land and get a certain number of "prims" -- objects -- with which to build something. Note that you don't have to have land to build.
No one is buying virtual land outright. You pay monthly charges to Linden Lab based on the amount of land you want to control. No one of any sophistication is buying land and then expecting it to appreciate... certainly not when supply is a factor of how many servers Linden Lab decides to host.
That said, there are indeed people who play the real estate market or the currency exchange in this game, and there are those who sell "skins" and clothing and gadgets and vehicles. But spending money on any of those things is no different from any other indulgence purchase -- people spend the money because they are having fun. It's no different from spending money on a screensaver or an online poker game.
Your IP is logged. You will receive a Bill attached to your monthly inernet service charge and an e-mail message acknowledging your purchase into your web-browser cache.
Have a nice day and thanks for purchasing a virtual clock from our unlimited self-renewing stock!
Simply put, a derivative is as security whose value is derived from that of another, underlying security.
For instance, a stock option is a derivative whose underlier is an option.
In practise, complex derivatives have values that are functions (often very, very difficult or indeed unknowable functions) of various aspects of a range of underliers.
For instance, a credit default swap is a derivative whose underlier is a debt obligation, but its value usually varies only with the creditworthiness of the underlier, not with the other aspects.
Another way of looking at derivatives (depending on what you do with them) is to call them a contract which deals with your rights pertaining to another contract.
For instance, a commodities rollover is a contract that gives you the right to buy and sell two underlying commodity futures contracts. These underliers are themselves derivatives of an actual commodity such as gold. Rollovers are also used in finance (as opposed to commodities trading); in that case, the underliers may well be index-tracking products.
None of this has ANYTHING to do with virtual commodities trading, except that people engaged in virtual commodities trading usually trade futures, which are simple derivatives. They trade futures because it's damn hard to actually take delivery of 1,000,000 tons of orange juice.
Now, how the hell did the parent post get +5 informative?
The parent poster goes on to say a lot of very inaccurate things about derivatives -- for actual information anyone interested should check out a financial website (not Wikipedia!) such as http://www.investorwords.com/
This has been a PSA. Don't do drugs! Stay in school! And FFS don't day trade if you are at the level of the parent poster!
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
In Soviet Russia, the virtual property owned you.
Lets look up the word Virtual:
:to derive as a conclusion from facts or premises
taking the third def:of, relating to, or being a hypothetical particle whose existence is inferred from indirect evidence
And if we look up the word inferred we get
So if we derive a Derivative from the "conclusion" of the underlier; one could say a derivative is indeed virtual (however that "One" probably doesn't work in the financial services industry. Jargon has a specific time and a place)
So by your own admission, The grand parent post is INDEED correct; Derivatives are a virtual financial instrument.
And as for day trading; JUST SAY NO! Well, unless you are tired of gambling in Las Vegas... there are a myriad of ways to lose your money for fun. I prefer to light cigars with burning Benajmins...
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
It's no different to the question "what happens 10 years down the line when this hard disk I paid $150 for dies?" or "what happens 10 years down the line when this car I paid $12,000 for dies?" or pertinently right now, "What happens to my Rover car that I paid $15,000 when it breaks down and I can't get spares because Rover just went bankrupt?"
Virtual property is like anything else that can be traded; its value can increase or decrease relative to something else. It has a set of 'what ifs' attached to it like any piece of real property. Its value can be affected by the segment of the economy it's in (for example, the game developer can't just decide to make infinite land as a way of printing money, because if it's infinite it'll be worthless thanks to the laws of supply and demand).
Personally, I'm not interested - but that doesn't mean that I can't see that other people might find value in property within an online game. They can make up their own minds.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
> retry
"We launched Second Life without out-of-world trade, and after a few months we looked at and thought, 'This is wrong.'"
(This is exactly why we should teach people what hyphens are for.)
Can't disguise the fact that you are far less knowledgeable about this subject than the people you are responding to. Please shut up now.
Good points. And in the back of my mind I had wondered if real and virtual property were actually quite similar in terms of devaluation and life span. Like you said, in some ways they are, but in others they are still quite different. Sure, a car or electronics equipment or clothes might become worthless in the marketplace after just a few years, but you can keep them all the way until you die if you want. And some real property increases in value.
Agreed, I'm not interested either. Although I might be interested in making stuff to sell in these virtual worlds and make some money. I have to learn more about what's involved.
$50 in 21 hours???
You could do better than that bagging groceries.
$50 is eight hours of flipping burgers in a suburban McDonalds, kid.
Get a paper route, and you will have just as much money in less time, allowing you to spend your game time actually playing games instead of farming virtual property for sale.
Although it was not a "site" at all (in the pre-WWW days, a "site" was mostly used in the context of construction or archeology) - it was just a bunch of bytes in a server, lying somewhere in the world, on a place you usually didn't have any physical access.
Since then, "Web sites" became a common designation. You pay money for using a "service" which allows you to set up a "virtual server". The New Economy came and went using this paradigm; people still think that things like Yahoo, Google or even Slashdot have "real value" these days - and eventually buy and sell related concepts, like "domain names", on eBay - another virtual thingy.
This is not "strange" to us, as proud 2005 dwellers. Some of you will remember the days of skepticism when people claimed "paying for virtual Web sites? Why should I commit money/time to a thing that doesn't really exist?" We now laugh at those days since we've learned the value of "virtual web hosting". We know its possibilities, good and bad.
Enter "virtual land". Like "web sites", "virtual land" is just a metaphor, an analogy. You cannot "claim" that because the name "land" was picked to describe "remote 3D content storage", it has an analogue to "real estate", and use it at a base for an argument. It's just a name, nothing more. It doesn't have intrinsic value - just like a "Web site" is not more or less valuable than a construction site or an archaelogical site.
It's just a metaphor.
Now, we can agree or disagree if "remote 3D content storage" is or not a business, or if Linden Lab - the company behind the Second Life platform - is or not promoting this business successfully. If you like, compare it to Akamai. Like Akamai (whose Web site runs on Linux/Apache 1.3.33), Linden Lab has a large grid of servers (running Linux and mostly open source software) which host Gigabytes of content, and stream it over the net. Akamai does mostly video and sound, Linden Lab does 3D content. Akamai demands a special setup for you to include your videos and music into your pages, which is proprietary software, but which they give away for their customers (although the streaming uses standard protocols). Linden Lab demands you to use a special 3D browser, free to download for their customers, to be able to visualize the 3D content. Akamai has probably a set of tools to help you out to set up your video/audio streaming (I haven't used them recently); Linden Lab, inside the free 3D browser, has included a fully-featured 3D modelling tool, relying upon collaborative work (ie. many people can model the same object at the same time, and all see the results in real time), targeted towards amateurs and not professional 3D designers. Akamai does not provide its own content; people store their own intellectual property on their network of servers, Akamai is just the remote repository for that intellectual property. Similarly, Linden Lab does not provide content, just storage, technical support, and a staff to help you out to manage your content. Akamai has a world-wide network that tries to stream your content efficiently; Linden Lab has only now started to do the same (ie. several separate co-location facilities where 3D content is stored and streamed appropriately). Akamai probably does off-site backups of your data, in case of disruption, they can put it on another server; Linden Lab most definitely has precisely the same service (and yes, they have used those off-site backups at least once in he past year).
Akamai is a multi-billion, successfull company engaged in providing quality streaming video/audio around the world. Linden Lab is a tiny Californian company focusing on streaming 3D content.
I'm not claiming that Linden Lab is Akamai, just that they have similar business setups, up to a point. The major difference, of course, is on the type of content hosted remotely. 3D content is handled very differently t
"I'm not building a game. I'm building a new country." -- Philip "Linden" Rosedale, interview to Wired, 2004-05-08