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here was a time when becoming another person meant drastic measures: a sex change, faking your own death. But today, virtual worlds — massive online communities of people acting out alternate lives — claim to provide this transformation. Want to be an eight-foot-tall escort with a mansion on a mountaintop? they ask. It's yours! Whether they fulfill this claim depends on your ability to suspend disbelief. Not only do virtual worlds like Second Life look cartoonish at the graphic level, they also remove most of the messy, unpredictable aspects of existence — the very things that make life life. This advantage is both their most appealing and their most unrealistic feature, an argument many virtual-world boosters would counter with the assertion that reality is overrated.

London-based journalist Tim Guest spent months as a citizen of these realms for his new book, Second Lives: A Journey Through Virtual Worlds. As a child, Guest was raised by his mother in a commune in the English countryside, an experience that informs his view of artificially constructed community. In the online worlds he explored, he befriended financiers, criminals and hookers — all in the virtual sense. His documentation of the fantasy culture percolating inside virtual worlds says a lot about our real world, what we want more of and what we want less. He spoke to Hooksexup about escapism, addiction and sex with avatars other than his girlfriend. — Will Doig

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.

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And they'll do things in these games that they'd never do in their real life, because you get experience without risk.

I think the "experience without risk" factor is part of why people who live in these virtual worlds are often considered losers. Like the person in your book who named his avatar J.C. Soprano and sells his "services" in Second Life as a mafia hitman — he's totally serious about it. Do most of the people in these worlds live up to the loser stereotype?
Not really, no. Some were. That mafia guy, he takes it absolutely seriously, this melodramatic lifestyle he's living out. But as a group, you'd be surprised how many were restricted in their real lives physically. Not necessarily disabled, but they were caregivers, or people with children. This woman Aurora Wolcott was a virtual escort, and she had a hole in her heart, a frailty, and escorting online became her way of experiencing something she couldn't do in real life. I'd expected a lot of them to be Klingon-speaking Trekkies, but that wasn't really the case.

You write that one in five EverQuest players say they consider their online world — not their house or apartment — to be their actual home. It paints a dystopic picture of the future, all of us hunched over computers as the real world crumbles around us.
I'm not totally convinced New York will become like the Mayan ruins because of this. In the 1890s, American cinema parlors were considered nefarious places that would suck the life out of youth, and there was debate in the Senate as to whether they should be banned. But each generation finds a way to integrate these things into their lives.

Why do you think certain people love virtual worlds, while others spend ten minutes in them and decide it's ridiculous?
One of the communes I grew up in was bought by my mother and her friends for 150,000 pounds. I found a brochure for the same building today, and it's been cut up into forty or fifty flats, and the cheapest of those flats is selling for 150,000 pounds. What's happened is, space is at a higher premium than it's ever been before. It's much harder today to find a place to gather that's not based on capitalism and consumption. I think the people who use virtual worlds, they're expressing that basic need to be free of those constraints of community through consumption.

I also wonder if the escapism extends to people wanting to escape their own bodies. In Second Life, you can basically become pure brain.
I agree, and I think this trying to get away from the body, the meat that has complex meanings and violent urges, it's an illusion. It's a betrayal in a way, this idea that everything happens in the mind. The people who get married in Second Life, the idea there seems to be that love is purely a product of the mind, and that just seems insane to me. The body has such a central role in our sexual lives, in our physical lives, that you can't just leave it behind.

And yet people spend real money on virtual escorts in Second Life, which struck me as odd because the avatars don't look real at all.
People have an innate ability to project onto anything, especially if there's the feeling that there's someone on the other end. I think most of the escorts charge the equivalent of five to ten [real] dollars an hour, so the stakes are not that high.

Since most of the sex in Second Life seems to be between escorts and other players, it made me think maybe this is more of a prostitution fantasy than a sex fantasy, being able to legally hire someone and tell them what you want them to do.
And what you want them to be. One Second Life escort's business is becoming Drew Barrymore and Angelina Jolie for people. It gives you even more control. Again, it reminds me of the free-love era of the communes — you're not going to be judged, you've got nothing to lose.

Would your girlfriend mind if your avatar had sex with another avatar in Second Life?
I really don't think she would like it. But it's a new question, and people who are married in real life might also be married [to someone else] in Second Life, and that's not illegal. There's no technical bigamy going on there. There are people who dress up as children and have pedophile sex in there. Is that illegal? Actually, it's illegal in Europe but not in the U.S. So there are many areas that have not been defined.

There's the stereotype that Second Lifers can't get laid in real life. Do you think this is true?
I don't know. Every time I scratched the surface there were very real people behind the avatars. Interesting people with real lives. There was a woman who was in a relationship in real life and had only ever been with that one partner, so for her Second Life was a way for her to explore sex with other partners.

They say that because we have such long life spans now, lifelong monogamy is becoming unrealistic. Maybe this is a technology to help us cope with that.
I think it must be that. In the Bible it says something about thinking carnally about another woman is being unfaithful. I don't think people nowadays would agree with that, and similarly, I think people who have online sex don't see it as cheating. It's morally okay, a pocket they can put those desires into where they won't threaten their real-life relationship. 

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To order Second Lives: A Journey Through Virtual Worlds, click here.

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