MEDI 323: Individual: Googling Unrealestate

My tutor said that I should Google the term Unrealestate to see if I really was being original and also to see what other people thought it was.

It ranges from a cool name for an estate agents to something actually a bit more relevant in this article about online worlds and the wacky way that they effect the worlds economy. Most notably for me I am the fifth hit down!

From the article in wired this paragraph stands out most to me:

"These little economies raise big questions, therefore, and by no coincidence, they tend to be the big questions of the economic age. How, for instance, do we assign value to immaterial goods? What defines ownership when property becomes as fluid as thought? What defines productivity when work becomes a game and games become work?" -Julian Dibbell

The article case studies a man that works as a carpenter and also makes money selling the virtual houses he makes with the use of his blacksmith character in the game 'Ultima Online'. To me this article is exactly what i mean when I talk about Unrealestate. More and more due to a combination of the internet, consumerist culture and brand selling is this phenomenon becoming more apparent, prevalent and with it much more run-of-the-mill.

"For if it's true that economies are in many ways like games, and that the world's economy is getting more gamelike everyday, there remains one defining difference between the two: Games attract us with their very lack of consequence, whereas economies confront us with the least trivial pursuit of all, the pursuit of happiness. And while not even Dugger himself can say precisely how much happiness he bought when he bought that imaginary house, one thing was certain from the moment Troy Stolle put it up for auction. The game was over, and something as real as life was suddenly in play." -Julian Dibbell

This is very indicative of just how absorbed we are in the 'Hyper-real' the fact that the economies of game worlds are more and more interlinking with our real world economy, thinking about it I have purchased online goods for real money in games and online community's alike.