!Xabbu was silent for a long moment. They hung side by side, twin stars floating in an empty black sky, two angels gazing down from heaven at the immensity of humankind’s commercial imagination.
Otherland: The City of the Golden Shadow, Tad Williams
For anyone not familiar with Virtual Worlds, they are massive, online environments where people can meet, interact and play. Any definition is inevitably a simplification of the actual level of development these online worlds represent. People, in virtual worlds are no longer merely playing a game, they are living out a parallel existence where they have relationships, wage epic battles, get married, have virtual children, buy and sell goods such as clothing and real-estate, go to virtual online clubs for entertainment, change their appearance, hold down jobs, create empires, kill and be killed, learn and educate. In essence, if it exists in the real world, it exists in the virtual world. Virtual world inhabitants are living a virtual life driven as much by imagination, hope, vanity, desire, ambition, and sex as is their everyday life in the real world.
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