In what can easily be identified as the most expensive Sims game ever played, a “digital home” set up within an area like Mars sold for $ 500,000 (£ 360,000) or 288 Ether, a cryptocurrency, the latest to be bought on the market for intangible tokens.
The house, dubbed the “Mars House”, was designed by Toronto artist Krista Kim with the help of architect and video game, reports Dezeen magazine.
The new owner of the 3D digital file will be able to explore the rooms of the open-plan houses using Virtual reality (digital world) or, in the future, augmented reality (where digital elements added to a view of the real world). SuperRare, a marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), said it was the “first NFT digital house in the world”.
Light Sculpture
Kim described her creation as a “light sculpture”. Every room has clear walls – who needs privacy on an uninhabited planet? Outside, there are several translucent sunbathing chairs for catching rays under the toxic-looking red sky, presumably while wearing some sort of breathing apparatus.
The buyer now has a digital identity certificate protected by blockchain technology, described by New Yorker writer Nathan Heller in 2017 as “like the digital version of a scarf knitted by your grandmother. She uses one ball of yarn, and the result is continuous. Each stitch depends on the one just before it. It’s impossible to remove part of the fabric, or to substitute a swatch, without leaving some trace”.
The sale comes on the heels of the only digital work by artist Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, for $ 69.4m, “placing him among the top three artists,” according to Christie’s auction.
Other Popular NFT Sales
This week the first tweet by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, posted nearly 15 years ago, was sold as NFT for $ 2,915,835.47. Post said: “” just set my twttr “.
Earlier this month, Gucci launched sales of digital-only footwear at $17.99, a “virtual steal” at around $480 less than the luxury brand’s shoes usually sell for. The shoes could be “worn” using virtual and augmented reality.
Kim told Dezeen she believes the NFT market “supports positive change through the crypto revolution” and that this revolution will “create real political action to support green energy and sustainability”.
For the time being, NFTs are notoriously unsustainable, because producing an NFT is extremely energy-intensive. An artist named Joanie Lemercier who sold his digital works for six NFTs in 2019 calculated that the sale had used the equivalent of two years of energy use in his studio, Wired reported.
