What is with all this stuff about Second Life? Really .. I don’t get it. Sure I can understand the fascination with things like WoW; but even there the extremes some people seem to go to to play in a fantasy world boggles this old mind.

Sure there are some who would probably suggest that those of us that deal with the Internet on a daily basis live in a made up world to begin with so extending that to something like Second Life is only natural. With Second Life though unlike players of online games or writers of blogs you are supplanting a real existence with a model of one that exists on a server.

Companies on the other hand have begun to clue into this alternate reality; and with some of them, in a large way. Product placement is no longer just having a large red plastic cup of Coke on the desk of the American Idol judges. Now we have companies like Samsung creating a virtual island in a virtual world to sell a virtual product; or if you give the avatar with big breasts some personal information you can have that virtual cellphone for free.

Granted we can all get tired of our real lives at times but this melding (thanks Spock) of the real and the virtual by way of things like Second Life and WoW bothers me. Whether it is the fact that things like this can only broaden the existing apathy for social interaction on a face to face level; or whether it is that thought that we can longer longer seem to maintain a definite line between the real and the virtual I don’t know; but when corporations and governments begin realizing that the virtual is also their playground we have a problem.

Conversation Tags: Second Life, virtual, reality