What is more, feelings and emotions and understandings and wonderings generated in-world did not instantly go away when you hung up. There was a much stronger bond between real-world identities and in-world identities than anybody imagined there’d be. The in-world identities were perhaps too real.

The nature and social operation of a virtual world populated by virtual identities proved surprisingly hard to analyze, characterize and write down. Julian Dibbell [4] and Sherry Turkle [5] were early reporters on this scene. They wrote with intensity and insight about how the avatars tried heroically to define and agree upon social norms for these new societies.

Now fast forward to the 21^st century. Megabit broadband connections to anywhere in the world. $5,000 gaming machines with $1,000 super high-speed graphics boards and physics engines.

Early in 2007 Blizzard Entertainment announced that The World of Warcraft, one of their on-line games, had just passed 8 million subscribers worldwide. At peak times 250,000 of these subscribers were on-line and in the game. Yulgang, a virtual reality that is available only in China, claims over 9 million subscribers, with a similar number of simultaneously connected players. These are two of the biggest direct descendents of the DecSystem-10 MUD at Essex University, but there are hundreds and maybe thousands of other MMORPGs out there. The number of avatars roaming the land is approaching the population of France.

In [7] Edward Castronova argues that while these worlds may be virtual, they are still very real. He coins the phase “synthetic world” to refer to this emerging form of society. In one of the recently constructed synthetic worlds, Second Life [8, 9], player avatars can buy and sell in-world land.

They can manufacture and sell products. And they can offer and charge for services. All of these transactions are conducted in Lindens, the Second Life currency that can be exchanged at any number of money exchanges for U.S. dollars. It is Castronova’s view that Second Life is just as much an economy as any first life economy you might mention.

What is and is not an identity gets harder and harder to fathom. If avatars aren’t identities then why do my emotions react to them as if they were? In what sense is the patch of pixels on my screen with whom I conduct financial transactions and with whom I exchange sweet nothings as the synthetic sun goes down not an identity? It sure feels like one after I’ve logged off and I long to see the pixel patch again tomorrow evening.

It may be that as we strive to harden up the notion of real-world identity we are starting to glimpse complexities of what it is to be an identity that are hauntingly similar to what the inhabitants of the DecSystem-10 wrestled with over thirty years ago. Perhaps there is something that could be learned from the struggles of these early forms of synthetic being.

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