At the start of half term I travelled to Bangor for the ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference. It was a relatively small conference, but had participants from NZ, the US and Scandinavia among others. I was impressed by how quickly research into Second Life has moved on. A year ago I was watching very basic presentations along the lines of look-we’ve-got-an-island-now-what? This year people are working on medicine, libraries, art, economics, education, sociology – and coming up with some impressive results.

Denise Doyle aka wanderingfictions talked about the narratives and stories of virtual worlds that challenge our relationship with out own world. See her article  ‘Embodied narrative: the virtual nomad and the meta dreamer’ in International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media 3:2 (2007). She quoted Tom Boelstorff, author of  ‘Coming of Age in Second Life: an Anthropologist explores the virtually human’ as saying that avatars make virtual worlds real, if not actual. Unsurprisingly, the question of reality came up several times in the conference and there seems to be a growing consensus that it is possible to distinguish between the real (which virtual worlds are) and the actual (which they are not).