Why I am ditching the real world for a virtual life

Imagine my surprise when I rose one morning to find everyone pursuing a virtual life - an alternative reality that co-exists alongside us. Kind of like France.

The topic of France was, indeed, very pertinent to the events of that morning, when I opened my copy of The Guardian and found something that confused and worried me so deeply, I felt like sitting in a corner and quietly quivering.

A small town called Porcupine had become the latest battleground of Le Pen’s French National Front, and violence had broken out on the streets. However the idyllic town of Porcupine is not real. It exists only in Second Life.

Second Life is a virtual online world where people build houses, walk around and meet others, set up businesses and even trade in a special currency called Linden Dollars. You start by creating an ‘avatar’, a little computer model of what you would look like if you had £10 million and Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon.

This is the future of the internet, say Second Life’s creators.

Second Life

Three million people so far have uprooted themselves from reality and moved to cyberspace. The alternative world has become so vast that the Swedish government has just announced it is setting up an embassy there, to raise the profile of Sweden and give information to the ‘residents’.

However, this is not a completely innocent pastime. In recent months Second Life has been criticized on a number of levels. Whether it is tax, money laundering, pornography, indecent conversation, racism, fascism or rioting, it seems people can’t even leave society’s vices in the real world.

This week the BBC announced that it is starting CBBC World, where children can explore a similar environment to Second Life, with games and activities. Of course this will be very tightly monitored and controlled for safety reasons, but I can’t help feeling that now the virtual world is stealing our children too.

So this is the future of the internet. In 20 years we will no longer log on to plain text websites, but run around using the ‘avatars’ of death to find our information. For someone like me, who spends most of their day online, it’s going to become a struggle working out what is reality.

The idea of living in a virtual world, where we no longer feel the need to interact or talk with real people but simply plug ourselves in – maybe by the genitals – is frankly more than a little scary.

It’s not so much the act of attaching myself, but being the only one left, wandering empty streets while the whole world lives a life of fun and debauchery in cyberspace. So I’m giving in, goodbye cruel world, see you in the sunny streets of Porcupine.