There are lots of nowherelands here, lurking at the
end of a random teleport where you’ll land in the middle of nowhere, empty,
sometimes jagged, sometimes rolling, sometimes dead flat and featureless.
Then there’s where the land is no longer land at all but open water and
you appear falling down and down and down into the however deep its watery
depths are, which could be very or not at all. One just never knows when the
ground may open up beneath your feet without warning. This is especially so when you teleporting finds
you in mid-air as high as a few metres to even thousands and you find yourself
falling down and down and down. Just as
well we can fly here, or mostly as long as the land permissions allow you and
when they don’t, well, brace yourself for impact.
Nevertheless there are still adventures of a sort one to be had in nowherelands like seeing if is somewhere
or something or someone in nowhere, signs of life, habitation or anything: a
discarded prim, a pixel out of place, a breadcrumb or even something invisible
that isn’t visible as invisible things tend to be, not visible. Watch where you ‘tread’ though as you just never know what may be lurking, in a
virtual world virtually anything is virtually possible.
All land in Second Life has a name, some are brilliant, some baffling,
some boring, some utterly bizarre and I’ll blog on some of these another time,
but this land, this nowhereland is most often found to share one thing in
common in being called ‘Abandoned’ which sounds most mysterious and sinister, if
not a teeny bit apocalyptic. Strangely
sometimes these nowheres aren’t
labelled ‘abandoned’ and yet have no obvious
evidence of ownership or use one way or the other. Yet more intrigue.
Probably one of the biggest baffling mysteries in all this is why Second
Life still charges huge amounts of money for land purchase and rental. Not only that, whether you buy or merely
rent, everyone pays a ‘tier’, the
real fee behind the costs which even though charged in lindens, which is the
currency here, this actually is done with real money in the real world.
But if you are a landowner as opposed to a renter, you don’t really own
it either, not really. Everyone pays a tier fee even though you might have
bought the land for a bargain 1L, or linden, equivalent to pennies or cents in the
real world. Not only this but if you
decide to give it up you have two choices: find someone to buy off you or simply
hand it back to SL, in other words, ‘abandon’
it.
No one truly owns anything, not even anything you might ‘buy’.
It’s all smoke and mirrors.
See,
I said it was all very strange. I would think it’d be better if as much land
and space as possible was being used, ‘owned’,
and not how it is now with vast tracts of empty, or nowheres. Surely it makes sense to lower costs and fees, even have
giveaways, which has to be better than lots of barren and abandoned nowheres.© Anan Eebus/ Emma Calder
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