Welcome to the Future: Virtual Tourism and Property Ownership

Just recently, a few inhabitants of the various worlds at Second Life, a popular ‘user-created, 3D, virtual world community,’ filed a lawsuit against Linden Labs, the creators and owners of the Second Life website and software. Second Life is exactly what it sounds like: a place where you can go, create an avatar, and consequently begin to live the life of your avatar. You can build rooms, houses, cars, make new friends, make enemies, make islands, and even buy land.

The key-word here is buy. John Sutter over at CNN asked a new sort of techno-philosophical question which would have been completely insensible to people forty years ago – can you actually own virtual property? The denizens of Second Life say yes, and worry that if their ownership isn’t as legitimate as the actual US dollars they are investing into their ‘properties,’ Linden Labs should be held liable. $5 million dollars liable.

For some, reports on this case are tongue-in-cheek. Second Life is a virtual world, otherwise not real. If the world is not real, its virtues, morals and principles are likewise not real – class-struggle included. In other words, like in David Cronenberg’s techno-horror film ‘eXistenZ,’ Second Life is just a game. But still, for some, there is no irony here: the values are very much real, as reported here in the CNNMoney video detailing a couple who is profiting both virtually and literally from a Second Life real-estate boom.

For the uninitiated, the arguments regarding this debacle seem laughable, but real money and real reputations are at stake. That is to say, for those involved in the lawsuit, the dichotomies between the real and the virtual are not so distinct. If the history of Second Life is any indication, the patronage of it and other avatar-based communities is still growing, thus begging questions not only of ‘ownership,’ but other involvements within the respective communities, virtual tourism not excluded.

Despite the principle of the game being set squarely in the 21st century, experts place both the economy and law of Second Life somewhere in the 16th century, and still we have to remind ourselves that we’re talking of virtuality here, not reality.

[Image: cnn.com]