Virtual Life

As of about two weeks ago, I had never given any thought to virtual life. Then, in the series of a few days, I heard about virtual life games a handful of times, thus it caught my attention. There was a report on the local news about how virtual life games were going to be the next big thing on the Internet, an msn.com piece about the first person to make a fortune selling virtual real estate, and a passing reference to it in a blog I read regularly. I still can't quite wrap my head around this phenomenon, but as far as I understand it, people create avatars who then live in a virtual world doing similar things to what we do in the "real" world, such as going to parties, buying homes, buying and selling stock, etc. According to one source, there are about 20 million people actively participating in virtual life, which is roughly equivalent to the population of Australia.

The phenomenon interests me on a number of levels. First, what needs and desires are people meeting through the creation and manipulation of their avatar alter-egos and how are to understand identity in a world that includes both reality and virtual reality? Second, how will the existence of virtual life challenge what we think of as "real life"? Third, what are the theological implications of virtual life?