In the bluish glow of her screen, Mia gazes at the outline of a house she will probably never own. For 5 hours she has been standing guard in front of a virtual placard, in a city that exists only in the memory of distant servers. Her fingers are numb from clicking. Her eyes are burning. Outside, the real night has fallen over Tokyo, but Mia only has eyes for this scrap of digital land which, if luck smiles on her, could become her refuge in Eorzea.

This 32-year-old graphic designer says she has been spending her nights there for a week. She knows it’s absurd, she admits, but she has been saving up for this house for more than a year.

Welcome to the biggest housing crisis in the virtual world. A crisis every bit as bad as San Francisco’s or Paris’s, except that it unfolds in a universe where space could, in theory, be infinite.