Second Lives, by Tim Guest

These days, one naturally recoils from a book with "virtual" in the sub-title, the memory seared by a Nineties flashback of geeks wearing huge plastic goggles. But Second Life – the three-dimensional synthetic world accessible from the internet, boasting over 20 million current users – is a contemporary story worth telling. What makes Tim Guest's "journey through virtual worlds" more than the usual techno-gush is his unique back-story, and the resultant quirkiness of his sensibility. His first book, My Life in Orange, was an account of a childhood spent in communes run by the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, alongside his devotee mother. As he meets bikers with batwings and dancing Bertie Bassetts in his journeys through Second Life, Guest reflects on his own enduring desire to escape the everyday grind, through immersion in alternative worlds with alternative people.

Guest is all too well aware of the scandals that surrounded the Bhagwan community – its sexual trangressions, financial exploitations, even acts of near bio-terrorism. This makes him peculiarly articulate about the downsides, both grandiose and petty, in these self-created virtual communities. Yet there is an emotional commitment in his reportage. He keeps trying to reach beyond these pixellated chimeras and their cheesy scenarios, to engage with the actual fleshbots slumped in their chairs.

Guest constantly reminds us that Second Lifers are only indulging in that most ancient form of human escape: a flight of the imagination. Indeed, if you want to get around in Second Life, that's what you do – lift up and fly. The most poignant players Guest describes are a group of seriously disabled residents in a daytime home in Boston. Their indefatigable carer chanced upon Second Life, and helped them create and control a virtual character called Wilde. Wilde – either a spiky male punk, or a foxy female – has built an island community called Live2Give, whose slogan is "Welcome to the family of the world!"

Guest's point is obvious, but well-made: the freedoms that cyberspace offers to create new identities, and now entire new worlds, are more than the idlings of the affluent. Second Life is one more expression of our deeply-wired need to play, to explore our possible ways of being.

Yet even though many millions now have enough resource and leisure to lose ourselves in virtual worlds, we do not seem, by Guest's account, to be particularly developed as players. All the scams, routines and even work-ethics that might compel someone to become a digital escapee get lazily reproduced in Second Life. Mafias extort and coerce, dodgy traders find ways to counterfeit goods, and people labour away at their houses, or trades, or roles, in ways that often seem indistinguishable from "first life".

Guest's honest and intelligent account makes comprehensible a phenomenon which seems, at first glance, like science fiction made reality. But one awaits a "third life" that might become more – more politicised, more rigorous, even more daringly utopian, than the mildly restorative therapy that Second Life has become.

Pat Kane is the author of 'The Play Ethic' (Macmillan)

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