That’s essentially the same policy of the Metaverse Messenger (MM), a weekly SL community newspaper. “We don’t print anything about a person’s real life that they don’t want us to,” says publisher Kristan Hall, who sits on the MM masthead as her SL self, Katt Kongo. Hall herself embodies the weird disconnect between meatspace and virtual space. “In Second Life, I have a mansion, it’s on an island, I have a Mustang,” she says over the phone from Texas. In real life, she’s a 37-year-old mother of five who admits, “I don’t have a nice vehicle.” In Second Life, as the bosomy publisher of a 27-page newspaper with a circulation of 12,215 (up from six pages, and 400 readers in just a year), “a lot of people know who I am. I’m stopped. I will go somewhere and people will say, ‘Oh my God, it’s Katt Kongo!’ ” she laughs. “In real life, the neighbors are like, ‘That’s the lady with too many kids and too many cats.’ ”

Another real-world person experimenting with an entirely different SL persona is Boston-based blogger Andy Carvin. Last fall he joined SL as Andy Chowderhead, but he got “bored with it” and decided to create Abdi Kembla, an African refugee he modeled after photos he found online of former Somalian child soldiers.

“Previously, when I used my old Andy Chowderhead avatar, I found people were more likely to come over, say hello, and start a conversation. But with Abdi, people tended to just act as if I just weren’t even there,” says Carvin, who estimates that he spent between 20 and 30 hours in February and March exploring as Abdi. “The more I traveled through SL, the more I realized I seemed to be the only African-looking character around anywhere.” He adds, “I encountered gnomes, floating beams of light, characters that were shaped like boxes, elves, everything you can imagine — but no African-looking characters.”

"I think Second Life will be like the Web eventually," says Aimee Weber. "Almost everything cool will need to have a 3-d presence online."

Wagner James Au met about 100 real-life people usually shrouded by pixels at an SL convention held in New York last year. “You had people who looked like they were going to ask about Jean Luc Picard and you also had people who looked like they’re more interested in creating an S&M dungeon and doing tricks with juggling and fire,” Au says. “I would say, it was sort of a Star Trek convention meets Burning Man.”

A new art form
A few days after I’d been with Tripper Tapioca, I returned to Zephyr Heights to find a gang of spiky-haired delinquents riding bikes, attempting aerial stunts, and shooting guns in the skate park. (Tapioca and Gateaux weren’t around or they would have stopped the pistol-play.) Another time, I found Gateaux himself slumped over the area and levitating like an inverted vampire. Outfitted in a dark suit with a red-handkerchief-stuffed breast pocket and red tie, the lean, swarthy avatar eventually woke up, recognized me, and floated down to explain that even though he was logged into Second Life, in real-life he was neglecting his computer-powered chassis while he read an article.

I ask Gateaux if he’s still holding Russian roulette tomorrow night. “Oh yes we are,” he writes. “I think you’re gonna like it … And bring alot [sic] of cash.”

I hear different things about death in Second Life. Ever since I saw the Russian-roulette tables, I’ve been anxious to play. But that’s not until tomorrow.

In the meantime, Gateaux leads a guided tour of Zephyr Films Studios, a piece of land he and Tapioca have just begun turning into “a realistic movie studio.” We fly over to the studio back lot and land in a temporary office building, one of two boxy soundstages. There, Gateaux, who says he’s really a 19-year-old film student in Vancouver, types, “I can gain a lot of experience to use in my real life. Turning a script into a movie … it’s the same thing everywhere. And then editing, exactly the same.”