Why are people attracted to virtual worlds such as Second Life?
A. People have needs and desires in the physical world that maybe a virtual world could fill. But new things emerge once you’re in the virtual world that you couldn’t have predicted and might find interesting. For example, people often go into Second Life to try being a different person – change their gender or race, for example – but they discover that SL is a great way to stay in touch with their aunt who lives three time zones away. Instead of calling each other in the actual world, they meet in SL and do stuff together. By the way, I say “the actual world” instead of “real life” because it’s clear that virtual worlds are real places of human culture. Q. Why did you choose to study SL? A. Plenty of people look at human-computer interaction. I wanted to try something that anthropology had not quite done before – a full-scale ethnographic study of a virtual world. With that in mind, it was important for me to have a really open-ended virtual world where it would be easier for me to be
