Virtual Real Estate is Real Real Estate
“So you’re telling me people are spending thousands of dollars on imaginary land?!” This has become one of those jokes. The ones where, despite the fact you’ve heard it a hundred times already, everyone seems to think they’re clever when they drop it on you. The tone always suggests they half expect me to stammer, “Oh my God… I… I never thought of it that way!…”
Instead, I just tend to just reply, “Yep.”
Why argue, after all? The people who ask it don’t actually want to understand anything. They just want to make a point about how dumb they think buyers of virtual real estate really are. Message received.
It was an incredible affirmation for me, then, when someone with the reputation and standing of Dr. David Chalmers weighed in with many of the same thoughts that I had on the matter. Chalmers is best known as a philosopher of mind and consciousness,¹ but he has also given a lot of attention to virtual worlds and simulations, exploring their implications for the primary questions of philosophy. His reflections on these subjects came together earlier this year as a large but wonderful volume entitled Reality+.²
The many ideas in the book are all arranged around one central assertion: “virtual worlds are real.” [p.12] If the analysis that brings Chalmers to this conclusion is correct, it means the objects within virtual worlds also really exist, and — importantly for this article— that virtual real estate is real real estate.
Getting “real”
Unfortunately, there is no consensus as to what makes something “real.” Like so many matters of philosophy, when one tries to nail down a definition, things quickly become complicated and debatable. There is, in fact, a whole philosophical field called “ontology” that deals with the matters of reality and existence. It’s a perennial set of topics, and the questions related to it have existed since before Plato and Socrates.³ So, rather than attempt to set up some unassailable definition of the term “real”, Chalmers references others’ thoughts on the matter and demonstrates how virtual worlds meet the criteria that they have established.
He starts with the most common understanding of reality, which is essentially the one found in the Oxford dictionary: “the state of things as they actually exist”.⁴ Chalmers calls this Reality as Existence, and it’s probably the sense in which most people understand the word. For virtual worlds to meet its standard, one must simply show that virtual worlds exist. And, indeed, they do... as bits: 1s and 0s that indicate the states of real transistors inside of real computers.
Now, you may not find this argument persuasive by itself. Indeed, most philosophers feel that “reality as existence” is not a particularly worthwhile rubric. It tends to just force one to ask a nearly identical question: “What is it to exist?”. It also fails to help us in our quest to distinguish between reality and illusion, since illusions and hallucinations exist at least within one’s own mind. The response has historically been to proceed to the next step up in specificity, which is the concept of Reality as Mind-Independence.
This is the standard approach within philosophy itself. “Reality as Mind-Independence” argues that horses are real, for example, because they would continue to exist even if there were no people to see them or think about them. Unicorns, by contrast, are not real because they exist only in our minds. This approach rather neatly solves the issue posed by illusions and hallucinations, and in the technical language of philosophy, the term “realism” refers to exactly this conception.⁵
So, let’s say we accept that reality is “that which exists independently of our minds.” We would still have no problem demonstrating that virtual worlds are real. Their persistence, even when nobody is using them, is actually one of their defining qualities.⁶ It distinguishes them from things like multiplayer game levels or single-player worlds, which vanish when the players leave. Virtual worlds continue running, with or without humans participating. Their states change according to their programming, and when you log back in, things will be slightly different even though there may have been nobody there to observe the changes happening.
A common objection here is to argue that mental objects can be real, too. Non-material culture, one’s perspective, thoughts themselves, and languages are real, if they have no physical form. They may exist in our minds, but they demonstrate their reality by having effects on the real world. This is called Reality as Causal Power. Under this rubric, horses are real because they can really eat grass or actually bring people to places. Unicorns are not real because they can’t participate in the chain of cause and effect. It’s a rather straightforward definition.
Once again, even if we proceed under these terms, virtual worlds still qualify as real. They cause things to happen in the physical world. People can buy physical goods with money raised in virtual worlds. Virtual worlds can affect people’s behavior, and I know of at least one case in which a person was killed as a result of an action taken in a virtual world!⁷ If we conceive of “the real” in this way, there can be no doubt that virtual worlds meet these requirements too.
Now, these are just three formulations. Chalmers mentions others in the book as well: Reality as Authenticity, Reality as Measurability, and so on. He demonstrates in a convincing manner that virtual worlds pass through the filter each time, no matter which approach you take.
The sole exception is the rather arbitrary assertion that only the physical is real. Upon reflection, this is rather obviously not the case. To assert that all reality is physical, one apparently denies the reality of their own subjective experience, the reality of information and language, the reality of numbers, and so on. (Honestly, when you consider the complexities that surround what numbers are, the nature of virtual worlds seems comparatively straightforward and obviously real.⁸) So, as disruptive to one’s worldview as it may be, one must leave behind the fixation on the physical to get a full understanding of what is truly real.
Analog and Digital
It’s important to understand, though, that I am not claiming that virtual real estate and physical real estate are the same thing. They aren’t. Their differences stem primarily from the fact that they are composed of two different substrates. One is made up of 1s and 0s, and the other of quarks and other fundamental particles. Still, as demonstrated through David Chalmers’s argumentation, both really exist.
Indeed, we’ve had decades now to process the fact that digital objects are every bit as real as physical ones. It’s just a difficult paradigm to take on board in a serious fashion. Even I, a person who writes about virtual real estate on a semi-professional basis, still find myself contrasting virtual world objects with “real-world” objects in my articles. The distinction is probably better expressed as that of the digital and the physical, or maybe the digital and the analog. But, perhaps because we’re so accustomed as a species to dealing with physical matter, we think of that alone as being “real.” It’s a difficult habit to overcome.
When we scrutinize our reasons, though, we must finally conclude they don’t hold up. Virtual worlds, in the end, are not pretend. Nor are the sections of them that we have come to call virtual real estate. Demonstrating their reality daily, people are currently buying, selling, leasing, developing, and monetizing virtual real estate as part of their living. Although it is still a relatively small asset class, it affects lives, and it’s time to take that with a certain level of seriousness. So, are people paying thousands of dollars for imaginary land? No. They’re just buying real estate. And the only pretending left is for those of us who still imagine it’s not the real thing.
1 —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers
3 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology
4 — https://www.lexico.com/definition/reality
5 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_realism
7 — https://www.smh.com.au/world/online-gamer-killed-for-selling-virtual-weapon-20050331-gdl12j.html
8— https://www.welovephilosophy.com/2012/12/17/do-numbers-exist/
