Here's an interesting example of the crossover between "real" worlds and virtual. MMORPG Project Entropia (which is a multiplayer online games whose economy is actually based on realworld funds--it's not Monopoly money) just held an auction for a virtual treasure island that netted $26,500. Here's the description of the island from the auction page:
A large island off a newly discovered continent surrounded by deep creature infested waters. The island boasts beautiful beaches ripe for developing beachfront property, an old volcano with rumors of fierce creatures within, the outback is overrun with mutants, and an area with a high concentration of robotic miners guarded by heavily armed assault robots indicates interesting mining opportunities.
The most extraordinary feature is a gigantic abandoned castle overlooking the island.
It is suspected that the island is the infamous “Site A”, where the original colonist arrival took place. The various findings in forms of old equipment suggest this even more. A broken down teleporter and some space ship docks have been discovered as well. Site A was, according to Imperial records, abandoned after the continent was deemed too wild and dangerous for the first phase of planetary colonization.
What's really funny about this is the fact the money is one of the least concrete, material things in our culture. Money, like language, operates as a consensually shared hallucination (to use Gibson's ubiquitous definition of cyberspace)--there's no concrete connection between a material object and its economic value. That's why cultural theorists defining postmodernism draw so heavily on economic theory--the breakdown of language and the breakdown of traditional capitalism are essentially the same thing. But it's interesting the number of posts following up at Slashdot ridicule the person who bought this virtual island for so much ("real") money; but there's no real reason, from a postmodern/capitalist standpoint, why a virtual island should be worth more than, say, a Picasso sketch or a diamond ring.
Even things that seem like they have "inherent" worth are, due to their circulation in the economic system, relatively arbitrarily valued. This doesn't mean, btw, that this relativity means there's no connection between object and value, only that it's dramatically contingent. As Stuart Hall put it, "no necessary meaning" doesn't mean "necessarily no meaning".
[via Slashdot]
Posted by johndan at December 14, 2004 08:02 PM | TrackBack