Slashdot Mirror
Coldwell Banker To Sell Second Life Properties
Dekortage sends news of what may be a new development in the attempted mainstreaming of Second Life. We've seen plenty of examples of real-world news media, politicos, and PR campaigns setting up in SL. But so far most of this action has been about first-life organizations trying to gain real-world publicity by their forays into SL. CNN is reporting that the real estate firm Coldwell Banker is moving into SL for the purpose of selling and renting in-world properties. From the article: "Coldwell Banker has bought extensive tracts of property on the central 'mainland' of Second Life. (Most companies own 'islands' scattered all over.) It subdivided this digital land into 520 individual houses and living units, half of which it will sell and half it will rent... 'A small number of land barons mostly control real estate in Second Life, and we thought we could bring real estate to the masses,' [a VP explained]."
Has Linden guaranteed in writing that they will never expand the world? If not, then Coldwell Banker buyers are idiots.
What is to keep Linden from increasing the amount of land? ( They did it back in 2003, IIRC ) Not only would this give them more space for more players, but it decreases the power of land barons. And having a 'new world' to explore would add more interest to the game. Anyone want to be Magellan? Or Columbus? There seems to be no downside for Linden to increase the ammount of land.
There definitely is a downside to NOT increasing the ammount of land: competition. If SL gets too crowded, that just helps up-and-coming competitors.
As supply increases, price decreases. There is not even the real-world parallel of "location, location, and location" to uphold property value in Second Life because of teleportation.
I predict that Coldwell Banker will lose their shirts on this one.
If I can get one of those 30 year, first 5 years interest-only subprime mortgages here? Maybe this is the way to "save" the sub-primes - virtual property! After all, it seems that "virtual" clients didn't work to well...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You don't understand...
When you die in New Jersey, you die in real life !
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Because when they do, the real world press writes about it.
No, but you could have your account warned/suspended for abuse(shooting someone can send them flying quite far, depending on how the weapon is made). You can't kill someone, by the way - even if you trapped them in a box or whatever, they can teleport out.
(PS. If you ever go into the sandboxes in Second Life, you'll see all sorts of other types of abuse too - floating batman cubes/bananaphones which follow you around playing an annoying/catchy* loop, hundreds of stupidly high-detail models just left lying around by their long-gone creators, bendy penises which follow people around annoying them, thousands of physics objects which attempt to waste the simulator's resources, etc.)
*delete where appropriate
When people are too addictive to games such that the line between reality and virtuality is blurred, it starts to get into a dangerous point. Life suddenly becomes all about speculation, nothing is real and no productivity is gained for human societies as a whole.
It's the worst kind of speculation we can have, worse than speculating on the stock or commodity market. If you buy a bunch of stocks on a company, and if the market crashes, you still own bits of that company, and the company may be just doing well, making a profit every year. If you buy the so-called lands in SL, and if SL were to die, what are you left up with?
I think this is where gamings are dangerous. And this is an area where I support legislative control. We already have regulations on stock markets, on currency trading, on casino, on auction, on the general trading, etc, we might as well have regulations on the worst kind of speculation: speculation on nothing.
Who the hell actually plays Second Life? I seed tons of stories on /. and digg about it, but out of all the incredibly geeky people I know, none of them plays Second Life (or at least they wont admit to it).
Can anyone say...... loser?
The five million people who spend varying amounts of time in Second Life have probably heard the word before. Has it never been applied to you for playing D&D? Well, OK then...
So what happens if I create a person in SL, have this make pretend person go and get/buy a gun. Next I have this make pretend person go and shoot someone. Does that mean that in _real_life_ I get arrested for murder?
If you're in areas of Second Life that allow people to be killed (most of the areas don't). So, no, there's no ramifications for killing someone in SL. That doesn't mean there won't be someday. I could see a time where SL avatars' real life owners are sued for the equivalent of Denial of Service attacks.
The first thing I did after reading the summary was check my calendar. April 1 is still a week away though. Maybe they're just trying to get ahead in the April fools market.
I'm convinced that the only people "playing" second life are the people writing these articles. I think that technology columnists are fascinated with the idea of second life, and love to write about it. I can't fault them for that, because the idea does have interesting implications, but I think they do us all a disservice by continually giving attention to a "phenomenon" that no one actually cares about.
After reading countless articles about this wonderful new world of second life, I decided to check it out. What a piece of bloated crap-ware. I don't think the idea behind second life is worthless, but it's current incarnation is a joke.
I don't have a PS3, and have no plans currently to purchase one, but I think their new "Home" has a better chance of becoming popular than second life ever will.
I take it that SL is just some VR game?
Some VR game with, apparently, the BEST PRESS AGENT EVAR!
Seriously, they're in the news every damned day with stories like this. And yet the only people who actually play Second Life are furry pedophile rapists. Well, that might be an exaggeration, but that's the reputation the game has. How the hell do they get all this press? Sexual favors?
Comment of the year
Do any of you actually spend time in Second Life? I'm not talking just popping in and poking around once in a while (I've done that), I mean you spend significant amounts of time in the world, you've actually invested some time and energy into making your character your own, and maybe you even develop content for it. I'm more interested in people who are more into the actual enjoyment of the world rather than speculators or people strictly trying to sell their wares.
The reason I ask is because so many companies seem to be on the bandwagon of this thing, but my friends are almost uniformly tech savvy early adopters and I don't know anybody who's ever logged into it other than to check it out and laugh at it. I've got nothing against it, and if anybody uses it I'm not going to laugh at you or anything. I may not see the appeal, but I don't see the appeal of a lot of things the average person likes. I just haven't seen anybody else who really likes it either, and that's made me question its popularity other than as a kind of inside joke.
I do think it's a great concept, and I'm sure true virtual worlds will be all the rage someday. I'm just suspicious that anybody actually sees this as a good enough implementation to really start spending time there. I've heard the furry community has taken up residence there to some extent, but honestly when I log in I hardly see any concentration of people anywhere, furry or not.
Game... blouses.
Virtual World War? Virtual riots? Virtual pillaging? Virtual squatting? Virtual Crime? Lets let the value of land plumet as it would in those real life situation.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
Of what happens if people stop giving a shit about a given game or perhaps "virtual universe" if you prefer. In the real world, while certain areas may experience a net loss in people, population keeps growing so overall there's more people who are in the market.
Well games, that's not the case. The player base can leave. UO and EQ are two examples of that happening. Once both were major players, and were able to claim more people playing them than any MMORPG before. Both now have dwindled to be minor players (about 1% marketshare in the case of UO). Thus if one had gotten in at the peak and banked on them continuing to grow, you'd have lost out. WoW is now the big dog by far, shattering every record before it and still growing, but for how long? At some point it will probably be supplanted by something else.
Thus speculation in game markets doesn't make sense in the same was as real markets. Expansion aside, people can simply move on, and if they do it isn't like they move to a new part of the world, they move to a completely different world (or worlds) with different rules.
Then, of course, there's always the question of what happens if the company pulls the plug. The servers go off, all of a sudden your investments are worth precisely zero.
Something always strikes me very odd about conversations about Second Life and their ilk here on Slashdot. Invariably someone decries the concept of buying "virtual goods" and renting "virtual property".
Let's step back a bit here... What is the difference between "software" and "a virtual shirt", or "digital music"? Are they not both just some pattern of ones and zeros? Sure, a virtual shirt only makes sense in terms of Second Life... But for me this is the same as buying digital music that can be played on some hardware device. Or buying software that can be run on some subset of computers.
Virtual land... Who would rent "virtual property"? What sense does that make? Perhaps we should ask all those that rent space for web pages?
That being said, I think Second Life is kinda daft in its implementation, but the concept is very very cool.
(I was only an egg, but then I cracked)
I have said this before:
SL is what the "player" makes of it. It has no goal, other than what you set for yourself.
Me, I hang with the SL fashionistas. I've done a bit of scripting with gadgets for the SL fashionistas in mind. I wander around and visit interesting places now and then, go listen to music now and then.