I am so not ready to commit to a second life. My first life already resembles Amy Winehouse's hair: a hornet's nest of unpredictability that requires constant propping up. But there are millions of people out there who are living via avatar in a computer-generated virtual online world, one of the most popular of these worlds being Second Life. Some of these people spend several hours a day in there, hunched over their computers as their real lives fall apart around them, as journalist Tim Guest discovered while residing in Second Life for a period of several months.
What makes some people abandon their real lives to live inside these virtual worlds almost full-time?
I think there's always a population of people who are looking to get entranced by anything — any kind of narcotic that can be sort of numbing. And they'll do things in these games that they'd never do in their real life, because you get experience without risk
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