Untitled+Second+Life+Property

=Property and Land in Second Life=

//"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need."// - Tyler Durden, Fight Club (Movie)

toc Unlike sex and self, property seems to be of paramount importance and meaning to Second Lifers. For some there is a great reason for this - not only did they put in the monetary investment to get a piece of property, but they spend more money and time setting that property up as a place for their avatar to 'live' and interact. In the real world property is not only an expression of one's self and status, but a taproot into community and a prerequisite for starting a family.

Property, then, is essential to human relations. Indeed, the current American government has emphasized the 'ownership society'. People buy homes to establish a base, some place where they can keep their possessions, and as a place where they can return to their families in the evening. A home provides some stability in real life.

Purchasing Property
There are different ways to purchase land on Second Life and different reasons to do so. This research will focus primarily on residential or 'private' land. It is important to note that the term 'property' here is used very loosely. The land that is bought on Second Life is not actually the property of the avatars or their users, though they may modify it and transfer it to a certain extent, it is still technically the property of Linden Labs and may be reclaimed, revised, or deleted at their discretion. In addition to the price users must pay to get land, they also must pay a land user fee to Linden Labs.

Residential Space
Residential space on the grid is not where a user lives, clearly, nor is it really where an avatar resides - for when a user logs out of Second Life their avatar vanishes. Though there are some who choose to leave their avatar on the grid day and night, most people are on Second Life for a maximum of several hours a day, logging out when they are finished with their experience.

It is completely unnecessary, then, to have residential space on Second Life. Unlike real life where a person who lacks access to residential space becomes homeless and generally devalued as a member of society, in Second Life there is no homelessness. Avatars can walk, fly, or teleport across the grid until their thirst for adventure and discovery is sated, and then simply be logged off, vanishing until their user decides to log back on again. Property, then, is devalued - but not deemphasized.

Indeed, owning property is important to many Second Lifers as a sign of status. Even more telling are the people who claim they own property to have a place to get away from the non-stop carnival of advertisement, sex and griefing that populates the rest of the grid. Has it ever occurred to these people that if sick of the gaudy commercialism of the Second Life grid they always have the option of logging off? Furthermore, if Second Life is such a powerful networking tool, a harbinger of the way human beings will communicate and interact in the new millenium, why do some seek to isolate themselves?

Auctions
One manner of purchasing newly created land from Linden Labs is via Second Life land auctions. In the US Dollar auctions on the http://www.secondlife.com website, property is auctioned off by parcel - meaning that a purchase of land directly from Linden Labs must be of a large portion of a region.. These parcels cost between $2,000 and $3,000 apiece. A region is around 65,536 virtual meters squared and costs $195 in monthly land use fees.

There are also auctions in the Linden-Dollar currency (L$) for subdivided land on parcels. These go for various starting prices depending on the size of the plot, but around L$4.3 per virtual square meter is the standard. Interestingly, bidding and price inflation within auctions seems to depend on the location of the new grid-point and how interesting the parcel's given name is. In Second Life, each land parcel is granted a name by Linden Labs with few exceptions.

Third Party Sales


Another option for buying property is by purchasing it from a third party. The owners of parcels will often subdivide their newly acquired property after some landscaping and look to turn a profit in L$ by offering it on the market to other users. These sales also occur when users decide to leave Second Life and trade in their SL property and possessions.

Private Islands


The most expensive option for purchasing new lands is to purchase a private island on a non-connected portion of the grid. These islands take up their own unique parcel and are not easily accessible by other Second Life users. An Island takes up an entire Second Life grid region and costs $1,675. These gridpoints allow users more direct control and security over their land - in fact, a Second Life island can be set up to exclude any or all other users on the grid.

Building and Developing Property
After a user buys property on Second Life they are left with a wide range of possibilities on how to develop it. Certain questions must be answered. Is the new space going to be public or private? If public, will it be a commercial space? What kind of rules will govern the land parcel? What kind of landscaping and structure should be built there?

Houses and Buildings


The first things to go up on a new parcel are usually buildings, whether they are to be residences, businesses, or just public space, most parcels on Second Life have some sort of structure with an 'inside' area. Commerce is almost always in an enclosed space. However, since weather and structural integrity are not concerns out on the grid, there is much more freedom to create open areas and floating rooms. This leads to a wide variety of design.

Users may opt to design and build their own structures or purchase prefabricated ones sold by other users. The most obvious benefit to designing one's own structure is that it costs nothing. Those who choose to design and build their own structures are also given the luxury of customizing their building for their specific uses. Self-made structures on Second Life are unique, personal items - however, these self-made buildings are increasingly rare out on the grid.

It is more common to buy a generic structure from someone who sells building designs. The repetition of design and landscape orientation gives certain parts of SL a Leavitttown feel, a digital suburb of homes with perfectly manicured lawns which never need to be mowed and beautiful flower beds which never need to be weeded full of plants which do not wilt or die in drought or winter. These buildings do not need maintenance. They have no plumbing to leak, no air conditioning or heat to break and create discomfort for their occupants. The windows never need to be shaded for no sunlight comes in. For some these are the ideal houses - ones that can be built or bought and then completely neglected.

Furnishings


Once a parcel has been landscaped and a building established, the next step is to furnish the area with objects. These decorations often start simply - people need places to sit. Seating can just be a plain chair or bench-like surface as the general Second Life interface allows users to make their avatars sit on almost anything.



Some seating involves the use of pose balls. A lot of Second Life furniture and objects involve pose balls to allow for automated interaction with the object or another avatar. Many private residences include sex beds or sex showers that employ pose balls. Other interactive objects include television sets and 'ipods' which play music from a user's library. A user can also subscribed to a SL radio station which broadcasts tunes to various parts of the grid.

Ornamentation can go from byzantine fountains, stair cases, and atria to a velvet Elvis hung on the wall. Some users clearly put a lot of thought into how their buildings are decorated as they display good design sense with symmetry, space, and color. Others seem to throw objects and items around with little thought whatsoever.

Working and Improving On Property
Furnishing is just one way to improve property. As with buildings, property improvements can be built by the user or bought from a third party. Some grid parcels resemble small cities with large buildings, streets, traffic lights, sidewalks, street signs, and kiosks giving the impression of a densely populated area. It can be disorienting entering such an area to find that there are no other active avatars to be found, but this is all-too-common in Second Life. Other grid areas look like virgin wilderness or carefully tended gardens, lush digital landscapes made to resemble a natural world teeming with life.

Building
//As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself.// - Friedrich Nietzsche

A minority of users create their own buildings, furniture, pose balls, and objects. The difference between self-made, custom built houses and the generically bought variety has already been discussed. Furniture and objects can also be made by users. One common technique is uploading one's own photography or artwork for placement within Second Life structures. This gives these digitally simulated areas a more realistic personal feel. It seems that few Second Life users actually exercise this option, though, and more choose to buy or custom order their property improvements.

Buying


Rather than taking the time and effort to build property improvements, most users now buy objects from commercial areas. Buildings and houses are sold throughout the grid for little money. By buying their stuff from an absentee merchant, who may or may not be the person who created the object, people are completely alienated from the labor which built their items. Furthermore, just like the virtual buildings they buy, these items do not require any upkeep. Imagine a car that does not need its oil changed, a basketball which never loses air, or a fence which does not need mending. In real life, a car would need maintenance from its owner or to be taken to a business which changes oil. If a basketball's owner did not have a pump, they would likely ask to borrow one from a neighbor. Broken fences are generally mended cooperatively by neighbors. In Second Life this kind of interaction is unnecessary. The basis for community development is irrelevant - no one really needs anyone else's help in Second Life.

Cars and Objects
//The one with the most toys when he dies, wins - unattributed//

The accumulation of objects on Second Life is a puzzling obsession shared by many. Second Lifers collect stuff - since Second Life is a digital world, most of this stuff does not translate to any real life value. It exists as a scrap of data on one of Linden Labs servers and little more, however, it is incredibly important to the users on Second Life. According to the Second Life wiki there are over 100 terrabytes of server space dedicated to user assets, and every object created since the formation of the grid is contained on this server. The sheer volume of users and items on Second Life has created lag in the programming which occasionally results in inventory loss, where the items in a user's inventory disappear from the servers. This has caused much outcry, but Linden Labs does not reimburse users for lost items, leading many to abandon the grid.

Transportation
The popularity of transportation objects may be a little difficult to understand, especially since every avatar has the ability to instantaneously teleport almost anywhere in the Second Life grid at any time. However, there are users who collect different transportation objects. Luxury cars are especially popular. In Second Life, since cost is less of a concern and there is no risk of emitting greenhouse gases or other pollutants into the atmosphere, large, ridiculous cars are prevalent.

Some Second Lifers own or build boats, either as models to explore or as forms of transportation. Since there is not a continuous ocean on Second Life these are not realistically useful for moving throughout the grid. Flight, on the other hand, is very popular. Any avatar can fly, but some areas high in the air require special objects to reach, including feathers or jetpacks which allow their users to fly higher and in manners which defy the Second Life physics engine (eg: through walls). Airplanes, spaceships, shuttlecraft, and other objects can also be built or bought with varying degrees of functionality.



Weapons


Weapons are a more complicated matter on Second Life. Pop-guns are very common, but with little effort users can find rifles, handguns, rocket launchers, swords, bows, staves, poleaxes, maces, lightsabres, phasers, lasers, and atom bombs. These are not usable in many of the public areas of Second Life through architectural controls, however use of certain weapons may be encouraged within certain role-playing areas. The users in these role-playing areas run a CS, or combat system (either one designed by Linden or one one built by a third party) to note damage to their avatar. When their avatar is 'killed' it is teleported out of the roleplaying area and back to their home location on the grid. For the most part these role-playing areas are self-governed but still accountable to the rules set down by Linden Labs.

Toys
Toys are just what they sound like, things to play with. Second Life avatars may be seen juggling or engaging in gameplay, all of these involve interaction with property or objects. Users may wish to buy game interfaces like a Zyngo machine for use at home or in their commercial spaces. Avatars may be attracted to Second Life parcels by the number of other avatars appearing there at the map, but games and objects to play and interact with will keep them there. The most active areas of Second Life have interactive objects, whether they are pose balls for sexual activity, game machines, dance floors, or televisions. Involvement is key for a popular parcel.

Involvement
Interactivity and involvement can turn a parcel suffering from the alienation of absentee shopkeeping or the sparse population of Second Life into a memorable area for guests and visitors. It also helps to give the users who live on or own the parcel something to do when they are not out crawling the grid. However, involvement is also key to being a Second Life users. Though Mastadon Mornington will discuss and explore a whole class of users who log on to Second Life to virtually do nothing (this infinitive was split on purpose), most users log on to Second Life to do something. Whether to engage in unusual sex acts with other avatars, to go to a political event or to just seek out and to have fun, Second Lifers log on with a motive in mind. This doesn't necessarily mean they immerse themselves in a virtual community of friends, but it does mean that there are people on the grid looking to meet and interact with others.

Status
The one with the most toys wins. Though many of the identity requisites for status in the real world do not apply to Second Life as they do to real life, there is a transferral of real life values on to Second Life. This is why so many Second Lifers build or buy huge tracts of land with giant mansions upon them. This is also why Second Lifers buy things like cars and high class clothes. These objects do not have prices in L$ which reflect their value in real life, but are desirable nonetheless. This is because users on the grid associate these digital representations with their real life counterparts and the status which comes with owning them. There are many parcels in Second Life where a user has built themselves a castle and hoarded a digital treasure of objects and items. The quantity and quality of fulfillment which such pursuits can bring is unclear.

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