Edward Castronova

In short, synthetic worlds put ordinary humanity in a very strange place, producing forces that deserve hardheaded attention, in my view. All things that matter to ordinary people - their loves, their crusades, their morals, and their material assets - may now have a home in a place other than Earth. As Lawrence Lessig (1999) describes it, the unusual thing about cyberspace is that we can be both here and there at the same time, and the place that is "there" can be constructed, essentially, however we might like. Thus, all of our interests are the same as they ever were, but the environment in which we pursue them has become untethered from the Earth environment with which we have become so comfortable.