It is hard, sometimes, though, to know when you are actually addressing the topic(s) brought up, or when you’re restating what you’ve said before. For example, I have never said that land inside SL has no value. I’ve explicitly said that it does, and that it is important to the systems set up in that world, including economic and immersive. Please hear me this time: land in SL clearly has value at several levels. I’m not arguing that.

What I *am* arguing is that land *must* have value in a virtual world. I suggested on TN one way in which sociality could be a value that stands in place of the economic value of land. There are others. There are also ways in which some of the things to which you ascribe value in SL — proximity, landscaping, neighbors — could be achieved without land valued in terms that are as similar to RL as those in SL. For example, you could have a system where players get to choose who their neighbors are. I like your plot, your landscaping, your company… I choose you as my norther-border neighbor. Maybe you only get to choose four neighbors, or use hex parcels and make it six or whatever. But you can have as many incoming “neighbors” as find your spot compelling.

I’ve also never said that the bits/bytes on the servers are without value and don’t need to be paid for. Sure. There has to be a way to keep the electrons running. But to say that the database objects viewed as “land” need to be the ones humping the toll isn’t the case. There is no land ownership in WoW (I know, I know… it’s a game, not a word… bear with me), but they pay for the servers. In a virtual world you could charge a sales tax on everything (including land), but not charge for the land itself or prims; only transactional income for the publisher. That way people would be encouraged to build more, and the ones who pay for the service are the ones getting the most value from those who build it. Builders pay nothing (per transaction), buyers pay for the matrix. If I’m a great builder with no RL money to spare for a database object called “land,” but I do have time and talent to build stuff that others will buy… a system with free land and prim rights would encourage that.

It all depends on what incentives a publishers wants to provide for different activities. Again — I got no problem at all with how SL does it, with land ownership in that sense, with the selling of virtual land, with developing it to increase its value, etc. etc. No problems. Not whining. Not complaining. What I am saying is that it’s not the only way to build a virtual world. I’m saying you could do it without ascribing certain values to land that, in the case of SL, are there because of the rules.

Issues of profitability and servers aside, I still say that — absent a rule set that promotes it — there is no intrinsic value in what we know as “virtual land.” There is intrinsic value in virtual objects that have been created by users; they have embedded time, art, craft, creativity, thoughts, emotion, etc. into them. In order to imbue virtual land with those attributes, a user must *do something* to the land. Is there inherent value, for example, in virtual terraforming? Sure. You’ve made the land *yours* then. There’s value in the architecture that sits on the land. On the time you spend making friends with the neighbors. But none of those things require that you pay for the land. Again… you can, and there’s nothing wrong with the SL method.

But there is a case to be made for a virtual world which values creatorship over ownership. Where that which is supremely worthy is not based on how many squares of the board you can buy, but how many cells in a brain you can stimulate.

First, the game gods cannot give your land back when it is stolen. The Lindens never do that. That’s why people get so angry at them refusing to reverse the seizures of bots. Now, you could say “they can if they want, they have server records,” but they chose to make it a rule never to do that. And that matters. And half the time, you really couldn’t get it back — it’s sold to an innocent third party, or dissolved into another lot, or the money is all cashed out — too bad for you.

Now, this is going to be long, sorry, but it has to be done:

I’m not “misquoting” you Andy, I’m taking your statements at face value to their logical conclusion. I honestly think you are in such a suffocating vacuum there at Terra Nova that you never really hear your words and you never have to face anyone argue with you or debate any of your cherished precepts. You’re one of the few reasonable and smart people there, among a lot of arrogant pretenders, so it’s a shame that you, too, somehow feel an urge to try to discredit me by accusing me of “misquoting.”

And truly, the only problem with this post is that my reply could have more @ signs to make it abundantly clear which points go to whom. Unfortunately, there is no mechanism to go back and edit them. And in fact, if your attitude toward land *is* a declaration that “land has no value outside of SL”; in fact, you do lean toward saying it has no value even *in* SL. When you say “the land itself has no actual value relative to anything other than the rules of SL” you ARE saying it “has no value outside of SL” because you’re saying only “the rules of SL” give it meaning. But server space is server space.

You’re saying in fact “it’s a game”. You’re saying “it’s a pixel”. I’m saying it’s no less real than a CD. I don’t think people should have to have such ridiculous time-wasting arguments like this in this day and age. My God, digital stuff is real, including virtual worlds, with real value. Why are we all sitting around hearing idiots rant about how it has no value? Were they like this about the first telephone calls? I guess so, I guess they were like Alexander Graham Bell using the telephone to say “Mr. Watson, come here I want to see you,” when he had a perfectly good telephone he could have talked to Mr. Watson on without demanding a house call.

You say land is merely a boundary marker — it has no *intrinsic value*. But of course it does. Land is land. You don’t say about a lot in real life “oh, that’s just a conventional set of boundaries” — to do so would be to out-deconstruct the most deconstructivist of deconstructivists. Of course, you can find hard leftists who say stuff like “all property is theft,” so RL land wouldn’t be property, it would be a crime merely because it was in one private set of hands instead of nationalized for the “good of the people”.

In SL, land is space, terraformed, with a geographical location, with trees and rocks on it. If you’re going to take up an attitude toward this sort of land as “all pixels” or “all code” or “merely an artifact in the software” then you can make the same claim about real-life land as all being in the mind of God. It just seems precious and deliberately cantankerous to keep trying to undermine land as a commodity and a valued thing.

These geeks on Terra Nova don’t mind a sword being real and love to tell stories about how some guy in Korea killed another guy over a sword. But when it comes to land, suddenly, they get all preachy on you — oh it’s not real. And you are little different when you say it has no value “outside the rules.”

Andy, when you add stuff to land, you are adding it to *something* — there’s a there there. It’s not like when you put all the stuff in inventory, whoops, the land withers away. It’s space. It’s a geographical contiguous representation and it has most of the features of RL land. If you’re going to say land is the graph paper in SL, you’d have to say it about real life land, too.

In There, they have a different concept than SL. They don’t have a permanent geographic contiguous rolling landscape. They have a concept called “drop zones”. So you carry around with you, say, a desert tropical isle or a snowy cabin and just drop it on the 4096 m2 or whatever it takes to fit it. When you are done sking or swimming you fold it back up in your backpack and that “drop zone” is then free. It doesn’t represent as some kind of visible flat space, to my knowledge, but I have to study it more. Perhaps then you could say “land is only a deck of cards you can lay out anywhere so it’s not real” but in fact, SL land can’t be worked like that, so *in SL* land does have a 1:1 ratio of substance to real-life land in taking up space, holding so much, being contiguous, etc.

You absolutely have to charge for it; you can’t offer server space for free. How will you pay for it? It’s this stubbornness that I simply won’t countenance in all of you folks at TN on this subject. My God, is it so friggin’ hard to understand *it is server space*. It has prim and avatar slots. It has CPUs. It has coordinates. If you don’t charge for it, Andy, you are subsidizing it — because you have to pay to buy the servers and maintain the servers. The land is on the servers. It’s very simple, direct stuff, not the word-salad that you, or worse, Occulte is making of it!

You maintain that your unwillingness to accept land as land hasn’t coloured your relationship to it as a business proposition. And that appears true, I don’t see that you have the animus toward land that so many of the Metarati do in SL or TN. But…you’re leaning awfully far over to that position by not conceding land has a value intrinsically. Your unwillingness to accept this — indeed, to constate it, because as one of the TN posters said, any thing for which there exists a market has a value — just seems suspect.

It seems to cover up some ideological problem, which I want you to think about. Most of the time, when I’ve probed this hostility in others, it has to do with all kinds of beliefs, prejudices, hostilities drawn from real life, from their religion, national culture, or bad experiences with realtors.

Most of the people talking interoperability, open-standards, etc. want to dispense with land completely as we know it. Indeed, on the wiki for the roadmap of the Architectural Working Group in SL, I had to deliberately put up a use case others were disavowing: “Second Life as we know it” which had “geographically contiguous land masses” etc. etc. There were all sort of enthusiasts for stacking everybody up and weaving them in and out of Moebius strips and portals and whatnot — there is almost a visceral loathing for land as a concept of proximity.

I don’t see that land “encourages bad behaviour”. That’s like saying imperialism is responsible for crime. It isn’t. People do bad things on land. Land exists in and of itself, you interact with it. It can’t itself engender bad behaviour in the form of various griefing activities. In fact, the griefers have a whole ideology they’ll tell you about called “disrupting immersion”. Land represents deep immersion; it’s this powerful state they wish to end in order to have power over people and take malicious delight in their misfortune.

When you said land “isn’t even” an ingredient, to me, that implied that you considered its candidacy as an ingredient and rejected it. So all I did was jumped over that and said, well, that would be interesting to say it’s an ingredient. But to stick with your statement as you only seem to want to contemplate it, you’re wrong. Land is an ingredient or even more of an ingredient than various bits and bobs — it’s a substrate. You say you “put the other ingredients on it”. Well, how could you do that if it had no reality, Andy??? Why is this so HARD to accept? It’s like a shelf with books on it. You don’t de-ontologize the shelf now, do you?? You don’t say, “I’ll say the books have substance and reality because they’re interesting, but the shelf is just dull wood, so it doesn’t get to be as real.”

I’ll repeat what I said, and I stand by it: “You can’t somehow segregate land out from everything else, and cry, “that has no value, but everything else does”. This is at the root of the problem of governance of virtual worlds, like the root of a lot of land and governance problems in real life.”

You’re in Second Life, correct? Well, you can’t just decide to expand out your land to fit the 50-foot bowling alley on the 20 foot lot, let’s say. Your parcel is your parcel. If you bought the 4096 m2, that’s all you have for your $25, Andy, it doesn’t magically expand like a script kiddy sandbox or something. It’s limited. Now, if you’re going to say, oh, but that’s a coder’s convention, and they could have decided to make everything 8192, I can only say: but those are the rules of the world, they made up those sizes, they always have the same number of prims, and that never, ever differs unless you make double prim void sims to back them up.

If you are going to say “oh, that’s only an arbitrary coder’s convention,” you could say the same thing about the Finger Lakes, that will never get wider or deeper or move to a new location one the “hand of God” sets down and makes them. So it’s silly to paint yourself into such meaningless corners. Land is limited; it has limited space; it has value as a scarce commodity.

I argue that you simply cannot have a world — and certainly not a *free* world without land, without private property. I realize this is heresy to all the hard leftist game gods who have a different view of real-life land, and that colours their attitude to its simulation. I don’t suffer from their memes and belief restrictions. Freedom of the press belongs to him who has one. You need land to have a second life. It’s your bulwark against the software makers, and they are forced to concede that in order to make a viable world.

This “increasing of size” you speak of sounds like the Sims Online. You start with X size, and X roomies. If you skill and make money, you can add more squares…and more…and more, each time getting more objects. It’s more of a game, going on along on certain rails.

In SL, however, it wouldn’t work that way in some automatic lock-step sense. Somebody might have a tiny 512 m2 store in which they sell one widget that is widely popular out of an Asian hut. Somebody else might have 32,000 m2 of trackless forest with nothing on it that they just enjoy aesthetically. Each could be of the same value to the owner, but once he sells it, its intrinsic value comes into play precisely because land *is* a commodity and it *does* have value and it *does* have a market. When the 512 is sold, it goes for the market value of $10/m, regardless of whether it once housed a fabulously successful widget business. The 32,000, if it is swampy, or PG, or next to ugly towers, will go down to $7/m no matter how much its Zen master once thought it was a source of deep contemplation.

The value of a virtual table is actually often more than a real table. I’m actually happy to go on ranting when it comes to affirming the reality of the virtual simply because people keep accepting it in the most common-sense way, give it value, the value holds, and they suffer none of these misgivings of the reflective eggheads who are merely the Bishop Berkeleys of their age.

Now, I’m going to say you are dead wrong about the term “eggheads” being so derogatory of insulting. My God, such thin skin people have on TN! Google the terms “Terra Nova” and “egghead” and see that people on forums and blogs use the term jokingly, even affectionately — what, Mark Wallace gets to say this, and I don’t?! It can be derogatory, but in the scheme of things, it’s a very, very mild term, and was used collectively. Contrast *that* with the sort of nasty, vindictive barb I suffer from the likes of dmx, who will rant “You are rude and aggressive, Prokofy,” singling me out personally — and delivering a name-calling characterization far worse than “egghead”.

And my God, “egghead” is exactly what you *do* have to call people to try to shake them awake from the ridiculous slumber of Gameland that they are in over at TN. But perhaps it is hopeless.

Ulitmately, Andy, it’s pretty simple: here’s the substrate that you put everything on, that you can buy and sell all by itself without the stuff, and there you are, claiming it has no intrinsic value.

I had to accomplish several things in that post, not just answer you, although it’s addressed to you merely because you bothered to answer twice before that. Why get all neuralgic and whine about a post “not being helpful” when it’s just a debate for Christ’s sake, not a job interview! It’s that kind of hue and cry that gets started there that forces the arbitrary and abusive mods there like Dan Hunter to ban me.

I find it a disgrace that grown-ups on an academic blog could ban someone like me, but let abusive, aggressive, vulgar, and obscene hate-filled goons rant at me for pages. Terra Nova is sexist, among other things.