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Well, it's official; I am now a landowner in SL, and damn proud of it. Owning land, in fact, is a universal rite of passage in the grid, for those who choose to upgrade to a more serious form of play there; it's the moment that you first start paying a significant amount of money to be there, the first time when your commitment becomes more than just time and energy. See, for those who don't know, there are two ways to be a resident within SL; through a "basic" account, free to use and good for as long as you want, or through a "premium" account, which costs either US$10 a month, or $72 (40 pounds, 55 euros) when an entire year is purchased at once. And the funny thing about it is that, when it comes to the actual gameplay there at the grid, there is absolutely no difference at all between the two types of accounts; basic players are allowed to wear the same clothing as premium ones do, create content and sell it, bring RL money in and out of the game, and everything else. In fact, just about the only major difference between a paying member and a free one is what I just mentioned; that one group is allowed to own land there, and the other isn't.

So given the negligible change in benefits between the two types of accounts, why is it that tens of thousands choose to send millions of dollars to Linden Lab each year anyway? Ah, but see, that's part of the mythos of Second Life, one of the many things there that is infamously difficult to explain to non-players; that when you remove the minority who are there specifically to set up retail stores, you're left with thousands upon thousands of people who simply like to own homes in the grid. Turns out that even in a virtual world, many of us crave a place we can call our own; a place where we can nest, host friends, get creative, or even just have a little privacy while trying on new clothes and the like. It is a place to rez into each time you log in, unlike random streetcorners like what happens with basic accountholders; a place to build, a place to decorate, a place to show off to others. It is a reflection of ourselves, just like most homes in RL; so it's no wonder, then, that it's of such importance to so many in the grid.

Now, choosing the land you want is no mean feat; we are talking about a geographical area larger than Boston, after all, of which 10 to 30 percent of it is eternally for sale, covering a variety of topological environments and even a section perpetually in winter. And land ain't cheap, either; even the smallest parcel you can purchase, 512 square meters, routinely goes for $10 to 25, and prices just go up from there. And then of course there are the land usage fees...ah yes, the dreaded land usage fees, which can make a simple-looking purchase there get unexpectedly complicated just a few months later. See, you can think of SL in some ways just like a high-end website; that somewhere in northern California, Linden Lab owns a roomful of servers in a giant walk-through refrigerator, and that it's by these servers talking with each other and all the visitors that either the game is played or the website is maintained.

Linden Lab has set up a pretty smart way for these servers to work, in fact; each physical one in their warehouse represents one "sim" of land within the grid, 64,000 square meters that are then stitched with all the other servers, to form the continents and islands found there. Linden's determined that it costs about $3,000 a year to maintain each of these hundreds and hundreds of servers; so what they do is simply charge this fee to the people who own the land on that server, broken down by exactly how much of it they own. So if you own an entire island in the grid, for example (as many, many people do), you pay that entire $3,000 a year yourself in land usage fees; but if you only own 512 square meters of it, you pay $60 a year, or five bucks a month. It's a brilliant way, I think, for Linden to cover the bandwidth and energy it costs to keep a server up and running; not only inherently fair, not only inherently transparent, but also with instant scalability built right into the system.

So the decision of where to buy land there ultimately becomes the same as in RL; location, location, location. But in a world of instant teleportation, a world of no zoning laws, what constitutes a good location anyway? Current surroundings do you no good; in the blink of an eye, that modest cottage of your next-door neighbor's can instantly become a 60-story concrete skyscraper, obliviating the view for which you bought that parcel in the first place. Are your neighboring parcels cut up into small slices? That can be a bad sign; such a place can easily become a "virtual suburbia" there, endless rows of "512"s with absolutely no sense of rhyme or rhythm to it at all. But then again, a huge parcel of unbroken land next to you can be a bad omen as well; it could signal the coming of a giant mall or casino, with not only the urban blight involved but also a profound sucking of the shared bandwidth that all of you on that sim compete for at any given moment.

So tomorrow, then, the saga of my own shopping experience; of what I myself decided makes for a good location in the grid, the places I found that fit that description, and why I ended up choosing the one I did, with of course a whole ton of photos as well. Hope you'll get a chance to come by on Saturday and check that out, or maybe on Monday morning when you go back to work. Have a good weekend!