I can remember feeling quietly concerned a few years ago looking on as my children tried out different careers, designed their own homes complete with swimming pools and gave birth to perfect offspring. They were playing – like many other kids of their generation – the strategic life-simulation computer game Sims, which happens to be the best-selling PC game in history. Sims certainly takes the concept of dolls houses or playing ‘mummies’ and ‘daddies’ into a new realm. I always found it slightly sinister, not least because of what appeared to be its addictive effect on the players. I would have preferred my children to be out building dens in the wood than hunched over a computer screen, pale and snappy. My daughter who at 12 has come through her Sims phase explained its appeal for her. ‘Because you’re a child you don’t really have your own life and it lets you do what adults do.’ The family she recreated in Sims had a mother AND a father and no annoying little brother. But she also described it as ‘tiring’ because you just have to keep going. ‘Because there are so many options, you want to try everything and you want everything to be perfect so it’s difficult to leave.’

Second Life is also a game about life – a fast-growing online virtual world for adults which it is estimated will attract one billion people in the next decade. In Second Life you can be anyone. You can escape the narrow confines of reality and experiment with your fantasy and, most interestingly, interact with and develop online relationships with other players from around the world. In his article on page four, John Daniel talks to people who inhabit this parallel universe about the appeal of Second Life. What of the possibilities it opens up for people with mental and physical disabilities to experience? We hear about a group of men and women with severe cerebral palsy and mental retardation who use Second Life to transcend the limits of their realities and experience the kind of liberated existence they could previously only have dreamt of. 

How do online relationships affect real-life relationships? In what ways can it be therapeutic for people to have the opportunity to connect to subpersonalities and unlived alter-egos? People may overcome social isolation through connecting with others in virtual worlds as well as increasing social isolation by giving up on communicating with those around them. Clearly there are also dangers associated with virtual worlds for people who struggle to distinguish between reality and fiction. But these questions are familiar territory for therapy which deals with the search for the authentic self. Generations of people are growing up for whom occupying virtual worlds at least some of the time is the norm. It’s time for us in the therapy profession to give this some serious thought.