Second life: unreality check

It doesn’t look like much, at least not from the outside. A pair of double doors on a quiet San Francisco street leading into a converted warehouse. The low morning sun casts shadows across the street, accentuating the edges of the surrounding buildings and making everything look sharper, more real. Once inside the double doors, though, reality effectively ceases to exist. Here there is no death, no disease, no pain, no gravity and no sex – or not as we know it. Here you can be anyone you want to be. Nine years ago a brown-haired, bug-eyed, boundlessly enthusiastic man in his late twenties called Philip Rosedale founded a website called Second Life. The principle behind it was simple enough. Using the latest technology, people would be able to enter a virtual world. There, they could create a new identity for themselves – an avatar. If they wanted to change sex, that was fine. If they wanted to have two heads and a tail and give themselves a silly name like Aurora Lunarsea, that was fine too. There were no limits, except the limits of users’ imaginations, and next to no rules.