Idea IS the format

“Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, `When I grow up I will go there.’”

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

When, in the late nineteenth century, Joseph Conrad embarked upon his literary exploration of the darkest recesses of the human condition, he can scarcely have imagined that, just over a century on, the ‘blank spaces’ would have been replaced by little green squares, and the new frontier would be called FrontierVille.

With the news, however, that Zynga’s new ‘western-themed Facebook game’ has enjoyed the most successful launch in the company’s short but spectacular history, comes the realisation that the New World is now a digital one, with people from all walks of life migrating en masse from one virtual land-grab to the next.

Take FarmVille, forerunner to FrontierVille, and Zynga’s signature title.  It currently boasts in the region of 80 million monthly active users worldwide, 30 million of whom log in at least once a day, ploughing mind-boggling amounts of time and effort into the cultivation of virtual crops inside this unlikely agrarian cornucopia.

It isn’t just time people are investing – there are innumerable opportunities for players to part with real money in exchange for a plethora of premium crops and agricultural accessories.  In commercial terms FarmVille is just one big walled garden – any value associated with your investment exists only within the context of the game, and the pleasure you take from playing it.

It’s a prize-winning irony of FarmVille that this proving ground for virtual goods revolves around something so exquisitely useless in its virtual form – food.  In one sense it can seem perverse, to think of all that care and attention invested in the cultivation of notional produce, while millions of people in the real world go hungry.

At the same time, maybe people’s time is better spent harvesting the benefits of a virtual small holding than it is mowing down innocent civilians in a Russian airport.  It’s vaguely satisfying to think of a proportion of FarmVille’s players extending the game-play experience into their real lives – less so the droves of angry young men playing Modern Warfare 2.

I’m not here to judge though.  I’m interested in the question of whether virtual goods can be genuinely useful.  And, more importantly still, whether they can actually go one up on their corporeal equivalents.

Consider, if you will, the greetings card.

Think about how many greetings cards you’ve sent and received over your lifetime.  Then consider the life-cycle of every one of those cards.

Following a resource-intensive fabrication process the card was likely transported by plane, train and/or automobile to whatever street corner its aspiring retailer resided on.  Here it occupied precious display space within serviced premises, conducting a patient vigil in anticipation of whatever personal milestone or festive landmark it was designed to idiosyncratically evangelise.  With each day that passed, it grew fractionally more fearful of failing to catch a consumer’s eye, and fading – literally and figuratively – into actual and cultural obsolescence.

Then its moment arrived – somebody bought it.  It was ecstatic.  All the other cards in the rack sent it meta-greetings-cards congratulating  it on the prospect of being lovingly inscribed with its very own hand-written message, before being borne once again on wing, rail and wheel unto its esteemed raison d’être, the recipient.

Who opened it, read it, smiled, waited a bit, then threw it away.

At a push, it might have got to sit on a shelf for a week or two, but that was likely little more than a stay of execution.  If it was really lucky, it got turned into a bookmark.  Which assumes, among other things, that it arrived in the hands of someone who still owned books with paper pages.

Now consider its virtual equivalent.

‘E-cards’ have been around for over a decade, some iterations far better engineered and executed than others.  For the purposes of this argument the most pertinent example is one of the most recently popular – the Facebook ‘gift’.

Introduced in February 2007, Facebook gifts are small themed images available to buy at a cost of US $1.00.  Once you purchase a gift you can then send it to any of your friends, along with a personalised message.  In January 2008 Facebook was reported to be selling gifts worth US $15m per year.  By November of the same year this had risen to $50-60m.  I can’t find any more recent figures, but I think it’s fair to assume that this number has continued to grow.

Crucially, and in spite of the fact that they could produce unlimited numbers of each gift for virtually no increased overhead, Facebook applied their own arbitrary limit to the quantities of each gift, ranging from 15,000 to 10 million.

In doing so, they were applying the principle of perceived scarcity.  Understanding that successful economies rely on finite quantities – of land, of raw materials – they recognised that in a virtual world, where these no longer naturally occur, they must be artificially imposed.

I’ve never given a Facebook gift, and I probably never will. The idea of parting with one whole dollar for the luxury of sending somebody a lurid little picture of a balloon seems every bit as risible as that of spending it on the paper and ink equivalent. If I send you one, it’s probably meant as an insult.

But then I, being the kind of self-absorbed, anti-social curmudgeon who regards greetings cards, gifts, flowers, chocolate eggs and the rest as a bit of a waste of time, am not the point.

The point is that the demand exists, that it will continue to do so, and that both these approaches appear to have the potential to satisfy the core consumer urges that drive it, manifested as the pleasure of the recipient, and the corresponding satisfaction of the sender.

Sure, the virtual version lacks the physical tactility of the traditional one, and therefore some of the tangibility.  But is the gesture any less tangible?  In both cases the actual transaction serves only to facilitate a social one.  Everything else is largely immaterial – except of course that in the case of the traditional card, it isn’t.

There are those – James Governor being one of them – who will tell you to go and do some research into the respective carbon footprints before you start waxing lyrical about the virtuosity of virtual goods.  James points to the fact that the electronic devices rendering our virtual lives consume energy with a ferocious intensity, not to mention the servers and network infrastructure bringing it all to our digital doorsteps.

Even so, I believe we’re looking at a paradigm with the potential to revolutionise the market for a growing variety of consumer goods, as we invest ever more time and effort into the pseudo-material enrichment of virtual lives.  I also believe that this continuing shift will have an accompanying economy of scale, in terms of the diminishing carbon footprint of each tiny server-side transaction, and the small burst of light required to bring it to life onscreen.

It’s a paradigm built on the principle of creating products that are 100% perceived value, promising all the pleasure of acquisition and the pride of ownership minus any of the commercial and ecological baggage of physical production, distribution and disposal.

It’s the capitalist’s Kool-Aid, and the environmentalist’s – all marketing and margin, nothing wasted along the way.  Nothing, that is, unless you subscribe to the view that it’s all a complete waste of time.  In which case look on the bright side.  If FarmVille proves anything, it’s that people still have plenty of that going spare.