Unreal Estate: Building a Dream Home on the Digital Frontier
September 2005

The garden patio outside an art gallery designed
by Troy Vogel. Credit: Troy Vogel

Troy Vogel is having an open house. I meet him at the art gallery he conceived as a venue for his own paintings and sculptures to tour the space and the artworks on display. Vogel’s Gallery V is an airy, rectangular atrium built on a grand industrial scale with shimmering red metallic walls and a ceiling made almost entirely of glass. Dressed in a tuxedo, Vogel shows me around the gallery, which he designed and built himself in October 2004. Immense canvases hang from the walls, depicting Cubist abstractions of Manhattan neighborhoods with titles like “Upper East Side” and “Hell’s Kitchen.” Vogel’s collection also includes an elaborate to-scale reproduction of The World Trade Center and, a three-dimensional timepiece with a floating pointer inspired by the clock on the Musée D’Orsay in Paris.

Despite my best efforts, I am having trouble keeping up with the tour. Vogel has vanished; he’s gone up to the roof, which, though transparent on the inside, as he explained, is an eye-catching solid metallic red when viewed from above. I can’t wait to see it, but there’s one tiny problem: I haven’t yet mastered the art of flight.

Most of the people who design buildings in Second Life, a 3D digital world hosted by San Francisco-based developer Linden Lab, don’t bother with silly things like stairs or elevators. Because each of the online environment’s inhabitants – the avatars (or online graphical personae) of the 20,000-plus real human beings who currently each pay Linden Lab a one-time $9.95 fee to join Second Life (plus a monthly rental rate if they choose to own land)-- can fly. As a result, some constructions, such as one popular nightclub, aren’t even located on solid ground: the bubble-shaped construction is suspended some 200 meters up in the cyber-ether. Thankfully, for motor-skill-challenged neophytes like me, flying isn’t the only way to explore the architectural wonders of Second Life. After flailing about on the ground like a baby bird for several minutes, Vogel, the gallery-owning nom de plume of 31-year-old Austin, Texas-based computer programmer Emin Sa?lamer, obligingly whisks me up to the roof via Second Life’s instant teleporting service.

Founded in 1999, Second Life is part of the booming Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing (MMORPG) community. MMORPGs are computer-based role-playing games that enable thousands of players to interact simultaneously in an evolving virtual world over the Internet. The roots of Second Life, alongside other popular games like Sony Online Entertainment’s EverQuest, Forterra Systems’ There.com, Mindark’s Project Entropia, and Electronic Arts’ The Sims Online, can be traced back to the non-graphical, text-based computer games of the 1970s, as well as pen-and-paper role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. Thanks to technological advances in graphics, processing speeds, and bandwidth as well as changes in Internet pricing models (from per-minute usage fees to flat-rate subscriptions,) today’s MMORPGs are attracting hundreds of thousands of users, many of whom spend upwards of 20 hours per week interacting with others in their chosen virtual environment. “For a while, Second Life was competing with my real life,” said Sa?lamer, who has felt on occasion like he’s been working two jobs: that of a programmer in Texas and of a gallerist in Second Life.

Time isn’t the only resource being invested in games like Second Life; players are also shelling out increasingly large sums of money to explore the digital frontier. For years, players of competitive games like EverQuest and Ultima Online have bought and sold everything from magic powers to weaponry to help them increase their power and status within the game. With the surge in popularity of more social environments such as There.com and Second Life, where the goal has less to do with defeating one’s enemies than creating a community, players are spending money in other ways, buying and selling everything from designer T-shirts and jewelry to mining rights and building materials. Linking virtual currencies such as “Linden Dollars” and “Therebucks” to real-world currencies facilitates trade – for example: 1800 Therebucks is equivalent to one US dollar. Despite the fact that some companies, such as Sony, forbid the buying and selling of virtual goods with real money on sites like eBay, the market is thriving. According to Edward Castronova, an associate professor of telecommunications at Indiana University who specializes in studying the economies of virtual worlds, the secondary market for virtual goods stands at close to $100 million globally.

In response to the needs of these growing communities and economies, game developers have gradually begun to allow players to buy and/or rent land as well as build on it. The virtual real estate market is proving to be one of the biggest areas for potential revenue generation in these virtual worlds. According to Philip Rosedale, founder and CEO of Second Life, the biggest earners in Second Life are “land speculators” – or virtual real estate agents. Houses in There.com have sold for as much as $750 apiece. Meanwhile, last December, a 22-year-old Australian gamer paid $26,500 in an auction for an island in Project Entropia, the biggest expenditure of real world cash on any single item in an MMORPG. While this seems like an exorbitant outlay for something that – from an outsider’s perspective – doesn’t even exist, the new owner is likely to reap a healthy real world profit from his virtual investment, both from the sale of land lots (there are 60 parcels of land on the island and the average price for each is currently $500) and from taxing other players who wish to hunt on or mine the land.

In some virtual worlds buildings are a means to an end: they are a vehicle for financial profit, create social prestige, or serve as a place to store or trade goods. In these kinds of games, constructions tend to be more utilitarian, with a stronger emphasis on function over form. Players either buy or rent buildings designed by the game developers, or customize their own from a limited number of pre-set objects.

In other environments,buildings are more of an end in themselves. Second Life, for instance, contains a vastly eclectic range of buildings from reconstructions mock-Tudor villages to aquarium dance clubs. For now, Second Life operates a very open platform architecturally speaking. There are no zoning laws, structures don’t have to observe the principles of physics, and users own intellectual property rights to all of the creations they construct using basic building blocks called “primitives” (prims.) “You are only restricted by your imagination,” explains Rosedale. That being said, building projects are limited to a degree by their size in relation to the amount of land owned and the number of prims used up in the construction process. Complex designs can be prim-heavy, so many in-world designers economize by creating designs in programs like Photoshop and importing flexible, lightweight surface textures rather than building solely with prims.

Today, the majority of people building structures in MMORPGs aren’t doing it primarily for financial gain or for pure aesthetic joy  -- after all, dedicated design software packages like 3D Studio Max render much more sophisticated models. People construct buildings in virtual worlds in order to create a sense of community; in order to socialize and communicate with other players. “It’s not about this being a medium to just create,” Second Lifer Jauani Wu is quoted as saying. “It’s that we can share it too.”

“To design a virtual world is perhaps the greatest act of the creative imagination there can be. The possibilities are absolutely limitless – you can make and do anything in them. Anything!” writes veteran virtual world designer Richard Bartle in his book Designing Virtual Worlds. As MMORPGs move increasingly towards player-generated content with a tangible commercial value attached to many aspects of that content, the trappings of the real world constantly threaten to compromise the limitless creativity of its virtual counterpart. There.com for instance, has instituted a “PG13” standard for all player-created content in order, said senior economy designer Bruce Boston, “to keep things clean.”

Meanwhile in Second Life, players have been voicing concerns to Linden Lab about the increased “mall-ification” of the environment. With trade being a cornerstone of virtual society, every object in Second Life tagged as a potential item for sale, and buildings springing up everywhere at the click of a mouse, it’s only a matter of time before chain stores arrive. Rosedale isn’t particularly concerned about the invasion of McDonalds. “There will be some chains,” said Rosedale. “But in Second Life you don’t need megastores to achieve economies of scale because of the greatly reduced costs of raw materials. So no real need to franchise.” However, evidence already suggests that Second Life’s highly creative community is warming to the idea of a one-stop-shop for all its basic needs. Second Life already boasts huge malls. External websites like slexchange.com and secondserver.net offer a full range of Second Life merchandise that residents can buy out-of-world, and it’s probably only a matter of time before big companies set up shop within Second Life.

Despite the general openness of the virtual real estate market in terms of design, affordability and availability, it’s ironic to see just how often people’s aspirations are tied to the real world. It might be easier and cheaper to colonize an island and build a wild, dream home on it in an MMORPG than it is in reality, but the desires of virtual communities are often very solidly rooted in reality. “I’ve always wanted to live in a place like San Diego,” said Paul, the 39-year-old web, database and applications developer behind Second Life avatar and waterfront property owner Portocarrero, who preferred not to reveal his real last name. “This is my chance to pretend I live in a warm, semi-arid landscape near water.”

For every diamond-encrusted synagogue or chocolate giraffe-shaped cottage out there in cyberspace, there are at least one hundred realistic-looking homes. “Although there are incredible experiments in architecture out there, the most common thing you see is the big, lakeside house with the huge patio,” said Rosedale. This phenomenon isn’t all that surprising when you consider the fact that the incorporation of commonplace objects that mimic reality are important for creating a sense of immersion in any virtual world. Nick Yee, a Stanford University-based researcher specializing in the study of the psychological and sociological aspects of virtual worlds goes further by drawing a parallel between architectural trends and the prevalence of role-playing in virtual worlds. “One might imagine that most people would try out new personalities and identities in these worlds, but typically only 1 - 2 servers out of 40 – 70 are set aside for role players,” said Yee. “When people are given the opportunity to recreate and redefine, they simply choose to cling on to what they are used to.”