For sale: One dream tower, prime location. Comes with pentagram, loom, spinning wheel, forge, anvil, and water trough. Current bid, $1,009.
The tower for sale on eBay would be a bargain by anyone's estimation, except for the tiny little fact that it doesn't actually exist. It's unreal estate, virtual property, a possession acquired in the fantasy role-playing game, Ultima Online. As of yesterday, there were 300 lots featuring Ultima property for sale on the popular auction site, with bids ranging from $5 to an astonishing $10,100.
There's nothing all that jaw-dropping about people paying to play; folks routinely drop a sizeable chunk of change to walk the links or to pull the bar at the slot machines. But the odd thing here is that folks are dishing out cold cash to buy status and power in a virtual world. Forget the down payment on the real house: They want to occupy luxurious digs in a universe where they pretend to be warriors and warlocks.
In the best-selling Internet game, players assume characters who hone professional skills to accumulate gold, acquire property, do a little swashbuckling, and slay a monster or two. The game has more than 130,000 active players, and the housing situation is getting tight in Ultima fantasyland. Players have turned to eBay to buy and sell towers, houses, and other virtual possessions; some portfolios have traded for as much as $3,000.
''There's a long cultural history of people paying to support an obsession,'' says Jason Bell, producer of Ultima Online, which was created by Origin Systems in Austin, Texas. ''The game is immensely social, and it works the way real society does. You increase your skills to buy a bigger house. It's not about being a winner; it's about power and status.''
There are two kinds of people trading in this unreal estate market: folks who love the idea of the game but pay someone else to do the hard work, and folks who don't mind doing the work and are eager to trade it for someone else's money. Andrew Varga, for one, loves to play; he just needs money to pay for his books when he returns to the University of Guelph in Ontario this fall. The Toronto native is currently selling two lots on eBay: He's offering 1 million units of gold (Ultima currency) for $400, and he's selling a house full of stuff for $250.
''I figured, `Why not?''' says Varga. ''I stockpiled these things, and I need money for college. I don't see anything wrong with making a profit. I like the game, but the only reason I'm doing this is to make money. I think it's pretty hilarious.''
But isn't the point of playing the game actually earning the goods yourself? Isn't the act of playing supposed to be the fun part? What's going on here? We live in a society in which we pay others to make us thin, young, sexy, and healthy. Now it seems we are also paying others to help us have good, old-fashioned (albeit virtual) fun. And the phenomenon isn't limited to Ultima Online; yesterday three speculators on eBay were selling portfolios on the Hollywood Stock Exchange, a virtual market based on the ups and downs of the film industry.
Is this the beginning of a virtual economy? We turned to Robert Reich, former secretary of labor, to answer that one. ''This move from an economy of three-dimensional objects to an economy of intangible things is not surprising,'' he says during an interview from his home on Cape Cod. ''But there is something else going on as well. Some people are extremely rich, and they are willing to spend their money on psychological or psychic thrills and comforts which seem exceedingly frivolous to the rest of us who don't have that kind of money. We are living in a new gilded age.''
One man's obsession is another man's profit. Ultima players are not only selling possessions; they're also hawking the skills they've spent hours building in the game, which is an on-line variation of Dungeons and Dragons. The more time you spend playing, the more skills you gain. One sale on eBay yesterday featured the following skills: tinkering and tailoring, stealthing and stealing, alchemy and anatomy, poisoning and healing. The bidding had already reached $1,750, and who knows? By the time the auction closes, maybe the seller will sweeten the deal by throwing in a virtual bridge.
How do you determine value in the gilded age of Internet auctions? Cyber artist Jeff Gates asked that question this summer when he posted an unusual offering on eBay. ''Information is the commodity of the new millennium,'' he wrote. ''What's stopping us from selling our own information? And to the highest bidder! My demographics are for sale! Find out what makes this almost middle-age artist and bureaucrat tick!''
Gates, who heads the new media initiative at the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian, views his eBay experiment as a kind of performance art. ''As an artist, I'm interested in the value of art, and I also wanted to talk about the notion of privacy,'' he says. Alas, his auction attracted plenty of attention, but no one was interested in paying for his statistics. Not to worry: He's going to print out his original auction page and turn it into a fine art print. And then he'll try to sell that. You never know: It might be the perfect thing to hang over the spinning wheel in the virtual tower.
