Terra Nova

» see terranova.blogs.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

I have never read a post on Terra Nova in the year it was published. That is a professional distance more than a geographic one: game studies in 2003 was a few dozen academics in English-speaking universities, and I was a computer engineering student in Ankara who played the games without once wondering who owned the sword. The archive is how I met this.

In 2003 the question of what a virtual sword was worth was not a joke question. People were paying real money for items in EverQuest and Ultima Online, economists were starting to measure the flows, and lawyers were working out whose property any of it was. Terra Nova was where that argument lived. Four academics started it on 11 September 2003: Edward Castronova, an economist, Julian Dibbell, a journalist, and the law professors Dan Hunter and Greg Lastowka.

It was a group blog in the old sense, with a masthead of contributors who posted essays and then argued underneath them for days. Real money trading was the founding subject and the range widened from there into virtual property law and the design of in-game economies. Journalists cited it. Second Life coverage in particular ran through it, because Terra Nova was where somebody who had actually read the literature would tell you what a Linden dollar was.

The years that mattered were 2003 to about 2010. Castronova's own accounting, written at the end, was that the site "maintained steady intellectual activity for a good 7 years" and then stayed up on goodwill for four more.

~ the case file ~

~ the unbundling ~

The closing post of 25 September 2014 is the best short account of why the field dissolved. Castronova's argument was that virtual worlds did not fail so much as come apart, with each component finding a bigger home somewhere else. Sociality went to Facebook and virtual currency went to Bitcoin, while the combat and the economy games headed off to DOTA and FarmVille. Once every piece had somewhere better to be, a blog about the assembled thing had no subject left.

The second half of that post is bleaker and has nothing to do with technology. He wrote that the one component of virtual worlds that never went anywhere, and that proved toxic to the medium itself, was the people. It had turned out impossible to make everyone feel like a hero in a world of millions of would-be heroes. He put the designers in a line with the utopian community builders of the nineteenth century and gave the same verdict on both.

~ one more year ~

The blog then refused to die on schedule. On 26 September, one day after the farewell, Ren Reynolds posted under the title "Arise TerraNova", said he had three pieces on esports half-written and that Castronova had handed him the keys. He brought two new contributors on board that December. The revival ran until April.

~ rip greg ~

Greg Lastowka was a law professor at Rutgers in Camden and one of the four founders. His 2010 book Virtual Justice was the standard text on the law of online worlds, the one that asked who owns a virtual asset and what a virtual crime is. He died at his home in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania on the night of 27 April 2015, of a rare and aggressive carcinoma. He was 46.

Reynolds posted the next morning, titled "RIP Greg": "Greg Lastowka died last night. I really can't find the words, if you can, feel free to comment below." Three people commented. Nothing was ever posted on Terra Nova again.

~ the archive question ~

Castronova's line about the money was "All this means is, I won't be auto-renewing the credit card payment. I assume the content will stay here." It did stay, for ten more years. Terra Nova was hosted on Typepad, and Typepad announced on 27 August 2025 that it would close on 30 September 2025 and take the blogs with it.

terranova.blogs.com now returns a redirect to typepad.com, which returns a redirect to a Network Solutions page selling the Typepad brand. Twelve years of argument about whether a virtual place can be owned, and the answer came back as a hosting decision made by people who had never read a word of it.

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