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I tend to get lonely at night. In fact, it's something I've incorporated into my daily routine for the summer: go to work, hit the gym, cook myself dinner, then get theatrically depressed somewhere between 8:30 and nine. Being sullen and in my twenties, I attempt to salve the ache with Gmail, plodding distractedly through every item in my inbox. On the night of July 25th, I was desperate enough to open something titled, "Need a New Life"? It had been sent out over an interns' email list and seemed to be advertising a virtual-reality computer game. Sign up, it said, and you can play out all your real-life fantasies in an online world. Overwhelming. I shut my laptop's screen and settled in with a book for the night.

* * *

In 2003, Linden Research, Inc. launched a computer program that allows its users to become immersed in an alternate universe. From creating a venue for sculpting the bodies and personalities of customizable avatars to dealing with actual US dollars in a virtual marketplace, the program, developed largely by former US Navy officer Cory Ondrejka, seems to provide its participants with all the trappings for a substitute existence. Appropriately, the game is called Second Life. Initially a success in the blogging and gaming communities, SL has expanded to accommodate a wide variety of interests, providing online existences for over 12 million people as of January 25, 2008.

Try as I might, though, I can't seem to embrace the idea of virtual reality. It seems like an escape valve for the dismally lonely. But when I'm being completely honest with myself, I realize that I'm somewhat envious of the gamers. I've always been told that it's weak to bury one's real-life difficulties in drugs or excessive spending or working too hard, and I suppose that until recently, I applied the same maxim to the creation of an alternate existence. I'd taken the high road, I liked to think, by not expressing my sublimated desires in the consequence-free Candyland of cyberspace.

But I keep hearing about SL and sheepishly wanting to know more. One morning, after reading the third article on it I've seen in a week, I decide to end my suffering. An experiment—an academic foray—into the world of Second Life just might help me out of my funk, and it will never develop into anything serious enough to threaten my otherwise bookish reputation.

For a fleeting instant, the prospect feels a bit like cosmetic surgery: here's my chance to hand-craft an idealized, digital version of me, complete with all my dimples and charms and likely endowed with a tighter ass. I entertain a brief fantasy of the new self I have the capacity to create: brighter eyes, nose without a bump, more athletic figure. But I'm still somewhat apprehensive about the whole thing. I decide that I should probably do some research before going under the knife. After all, users are allowed only one avatar with every cost-free basic membership, and I don't want to have to pay for mine to go to therapy.

After some hasty clicks through the SL website's intro, I visit the "Create an Avatar" page, where two optimally chiseled characters assure me that the modeling of my virtual self will be hassle-free: "Despite offering almost infinite possibilities, the tool to personalize your avatar is very simple to use and allows you to change anything you like, from the tip of your nose to the tint of your skin." The tip of my nose? The tint of my skin? The personal element of this directive is starting to freak me out. "Don't worry if it's not perfect at first, you can change your look at any time." Comma splice aside, this sentence doesn't seem quite right. Deciding that the infinite possibilities of SL and online worlds like it could lead to a hazardous level of dissatisfaction with actual life, I promise myself that I won't customize my avatar any further after her first run through the workshop.

I also set some other standards: I will try to make my SL as true to real life as possible (avoiding the manufacturers' temptations of dragons and motorcycles with wings), I will not use the game as a method of meeting a real-life "special someone" (enticing, I know), and I will most definitely not spend any actual US currency. After clicking on the "Explore," "Creations," and "Building" tabs and realizing that my restrictions coincide almost exactly with SL's goals for my experience, I decide that it might be better just to bite the bullet, forget the website, and start playing the game. But before downloading the program, I click on one last tab: "Have Fun." After all, that's mostly what I'm here to do.

The avatar that greets me is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, a pixie-haired blonde whirling her hips on an electric purple dance floor. "In Second Life, there's something new around every corner," says the text above her picture. "To find something to do at any time of the day or night, simply open the Search menu and click on Events. You'll see a list of Discussions, Sports, Commercial [sic], Entertainment, Games, Pageants, Education, Arts and Culture, and Charity/Support Groups." Okay, so perhaps this entire cornucopia of human achievement is not available at 4am in a small town in Ohio, but can't most people find at least some of these things to do where they actually live? It strikes me as a little counterintuitive that someone who wants to watch a basketball game would prefer to do it in a virtual world than to head out to their local stadium or at the very least turn on the TV.

Bewildered, I click "JOIN NOW!", and the website brings me to a menu of "Communities" that exist in Second Life. I peruse the profile of each carefully. There's "Frankfurt," a community that seems to operate entirely in German; Scion City, which approximates a 24/7 New York party experience; and BNT Holdings, a universe owned by a company that may or may not actually exist. Then, there's this little nugget:

* * *

Ben & Jerry's: Ben and Jerry's has made the leap into the virtual world. Take a tour of their futuristic environmentally friendly factory. Have an ice cream cone. Play the game called "Methaniac" and help to power the factory with meadow muffins. Ben & Jerry's in Second Life is the perfect place to start YOUR Second Life.

* * *

I picture a world populated entirely by pot smokers and dejected single women. Shuddering, I scroll on. Then I notice it: a Community called "The L Word." Advertising itself as a venue for recapping the details of the Showtime program bearing the same name, "The L Word" seems to be code for something else—the SL lesbian hangout. I'm surprised to find that Second Life has created an entire universe devoted to its queer female usership—until I remember that I've dated three computer programmers. Reminding myself not to turn this game into a hookup service, I enter the world and officially commence my Second Life.

During the eight and a half minutes it takes for the game to download, I browse the L Word Community website, entertaining myself with little details about life in my new home. The page provides images of realistic avatars for the show's entire cast, as well as a daily schedule of events for the present month. For kicks, I check out today's listings: morning coffee at the Planet Café from 11am—1pm and a dance party at the local club at ten. Seems like fun. I find myself planning the time in between, factoring in dinner, some reading, and at least an hour to get ready for the club. I'm somewhat embarrassed when I remember that my actual plans for the evening involve cleaning my bedroom and having coffee with a friend I've been blowing off for the past several months.

The game seems to be fully installed now, so I stop flipping through screen shots and commence the lengthy process of creating my character. First, they ask me for a name. After a moment of compulsion to use my actual one, I decide on "Reine" (pronounced "rain"), a name I'd chosen for myself in a philosophy class the summer I was sixteen. My professor had told us to think up our own "dream names," and I was at a loss. My classmates were all over the map: Matthew, India, Frank (for a girl), Tolstoy, Mazda, Chipotle. I desperately mined my imagination. My best friend and I called each other "Patchouli" and "Rain" as a half-serious nod to our bohemian tendencies, and that seemed valid enough. Just "Rain," even then, sounded to me like a secondary character in Debbie Does Dallas, so I garnished it with the sophistication of a French spelling. After all, "reine," like my Hebrew name "Malka," means "queen."

Second Life surnames, instead of being dreamed up by users, are selected from an impressively lengthy drop-down menu located just under the first-name box. I skim the list quickly for the names of former significant others and come back with only "Johnson," a pleasant memory, but nothing interesting enough for me to use. After I choose several name combinations that the game won't let me have because they've already been taken, the computer suggests "Waechter," and I'm too blasé to decline. Reine Waechter is who I will be.

Suddenly, I'm on an island with a sparkling, multicolored sunset, looking over the turned shoulders of an avatar I'm assuming is me. There's a map of the L Word Island in the upper right hand corner of my screen, where I also notice that the local time is 5:10pm, and I have zero lindens, the Second Life form of currency.

Ahead of me and slightly to the left-hand side, there appears to be a billboard containing messages from several L Word cast members. Setting my sights on it, I press the up arrow key and then the left. My avatar turns too sharply and hits a wall, but politely enough not to make a sound upon impact. She must know that I'm still learning. I remember at this moment why I've always been hesitant about trying role-playing games: each one seems to be a pixellated challenge in virtual coordination, and I can never comprehend why anyone would want to waste a half hour re-learning how to walk.

My avatar manages to toddle over to the billboard, whose first panel reads simply, "hold down the Alt button and left-click your head." Okay. The screen flashes to a series of svelte, CK model-esque avatar figures: "Left-click a picture of a look you like."

I choose a somewhat androgynous girl with short hair wearing a tight tee shirt, jeans, and a leather wrist cuff. Slowly, my avatar's clothing morphs to match hers. I notice that the jeans hang low enough to reveal some serious plumber's butt, but I've already chosen clothing, and according to my own rule, there's no going back. Besides, I have no guarantee that any of the other "looks" wouldn't suffer from the same problem.

The next billboard lets me customize my appearance to the minutest degree, and I take advantage of every toggle. Some of my worries about SL are assuaged when I'm given the option to "thicken" my figure or add more curves. I'm happy that the choices are there, but when it comes down to it, I find myself unable to let go of my avatar's abs of steel and speculate about the personal strength it takes to create a zaftig alter ego.

Sculpting the nose is a sensitive subject. A few months after I turned seventeen, my mother convinced me that rhinoplasty would be a good idea, and I bailed out of the plan a night before the surgery. It's still a source of tension between us.

My avatar's nose will be pointy, I decide, if only because I'm attracted to girls with that feature. It's cute. After I finish working on the nose, I promise myself that I won't touch it again.

Skin tone comes next. My character started out latté-colored, and I whiten her a few notches, despite myself. I then remove what I consider to be her obscene quantity of eye shadow, lighten her lip gloss, and manicure her eyebrows a bit. I shrink her breasts (in the process making them perkier), broaden her shoulders, and make her jaw slightly more square. Now we're talking.

Hair is the final major step. I turn hers blonde, sweep it forward, and narrow it in the front, making it stand up ever so slightly. I tilt it a tad to the side, giving her the girly pompadour I wear on days when I'm feeling courageous. Some extra toggles work out the wrinkles in her shirt, heighten her shoes, and fix the plumber's butt. I take a look at Reine: she's an idealized version of me. I will edit no more.

Triumphant and exhausted, I intend to walk her out of the Orientation Tutorial, away from the celebrity-dotted billboards and over to the Planet Café, where she'll arrive just in time for a pre-dinner beverage. I press the up arrow key, but she won't budge. I try each of the other directional buttons, but Reine seems to be riveted in place, staring at me languidly with every perspective shift the arrows bring about.

After a few minutes, I begin to get a little irritated. I've already lost hours of my life to sculpting an avatar whose only actual-world function seems to be weakening my body image, and now, she won't even do me the courtesy of walking a few steps when I ask her to. A blinking message above her head informs me that I'm soon to be logged off for inactivity.

I grab another beer from the refrigerator and contemplate an alternate strategy. Arriving at nothing after ten unproductive minutes of staring into space, I quit the game, banking on using the "unplug/re-plug" trick to get my avatar moving again. In the break, I refresh my now-daily Google search for Second Life.

I'm greeted with a Times article: "At Sundance, a Second Life Sweatshop is Art." It details the creation and development of "Invisible Threads," an SL denim sweatshop that custom-designs jeans for flesh-and-blood consumers. I boggle.

Apparently, shoppers order the jeans in-world, customizing the size and style by placing a request to a bevy of virtual factory workers. These "laborers," controlled en masse by a handful of armchair-bound overseers, are paid the equivalent of 90 cents per hour. Under the direction of their human guides, the avatars assemble twin images of the jeans, front and back. The images are then sent to a printer, printed out onto a sheet of denim, and pasted together by real-life people, who sell them for $35 apiece.

While the Times seems gung-ho about the process, I have a few lingering questions. Who exactly is working in these sweatshops for such a miserably low wage? Won't real-life laborers, who have the same potential to be exploited as current factory workers, be required to man the denim-printing stations? And I still can't visualize this: won't the jeans fall apart? This is all rather disturbing.

Ninety minutes, a shower, and some Indian take-out later, I enter the Planet with a refreshed sense of hope. I'm thrilled to see a bunch of floating nametags hovering around me, representing oodles of potential friends. I consider approaching the café's manager and asking for a rundown of the place's social scene, but it appears as though she has a tail. Remembering my verisimilitude rule, I walk on.

I'm starting to get excited; I love to be among mankind (or the closest available approximation, in this case). In my real life, I enjoy traveling from place to place, walking into cafés like this and just taking in the scene. Even if it's likely that I won't meet any of the people surrounding me, just knowing that they're there and enjoying each other makes a positive difference in my mood. To the extent that I consider Second Life characters people, I'm thrilled to be surrounded by so many interesting-looking "folks."

I pause the game for a second and visualize myself, the actual me, walking into a café all alone. It's a Sunday, mid-afternoon, and a large crowd of people seems to be gathered around one of the tables. What do I do? I picture myself walking up to the cluster, taking care to stand close to a pretty girl and asking her, grinning, what's going on. No. What would I actually do? I would order a coffee and sit down at a table nearby, but not too close. I'd read for a while. I'd set some arbitrary time limit like 20 minutes and at the end of it, go up to meet the people in the crowd if they were still there. If we got along, I might see one or two of them again.

The whole interaction seems a bit too nuanced for a rookie, so I leave the Planet after a few minutes for a breath of fresh air. In my wanderings, I come upon what seems to be another nucleus of activity on L Word Island: a huge outdoor dance floor. I can't hear any music, but I see speakers, and avatars hover around them in loosely clumped circles, some dancing. As I approach, I begin to "hear" them—which is to say, their dialogue starts appearing chatroom-style in the corner of my screen.

The group closest to me seems friendly enough, so I approach and "Gesture" in what turns out to be an autistic little wave. No one greets me, so I start paying attention to their conversation and realize that I'm not comprehending a word. They seem to be rehashing some inside joke they've all shared since the beginning of time, riffing in a stream of language I can only take to be 1337, the official talk of the Technology People. One of the girls makes a reference to "RL," and I assume that she must be referring to "real life." I'm starting to feel some pangs of nostalgia for reality, myself.

I'm becoming uncomfortable with eavesdropping on these people and not contributing at all. I'm about to move and try my luck in another location when someone mentions, in perfect English, how delighted she is to have purchased new clothing for her avatar. I chime in: "Oh, I plan on sticking in my n00b rags for as long as I possibly can." There. I've thrown in both a relevant comment and the only word of 1337 I've ever been taught. Still, I'm ignored.

In my "RL," my verbal skills are what get me by. I'm not attractive enough to be striking when I enter a room, and my dancing prowess is mediocre, but get me talking, and I may have a chance. Deprive me of my language, and I'm a wall decoration. At this extremely complicated non-dancing dance party on L Word Island, I feel similar to the way I did when I spent a few weeks in France just after high school. I knew the language well enough to navigate my way around, but it was as though someone had erased all of the personality-driven aspects of my capacity for dialogue: I no longer had the skills to be witty, sarcastic, or linguistically adept on any level beyond ludicrously childish pun. I remember being paranoid that people thought I was boring.

I must have spaced out for a bit, because the conversation's topic has shifted to a group of men standing at a not-so-distant radius. Males are a rarity on L Word Island, and I'm not the only one who's noticed.

"Look at that bunch of penises over there," says one of the girls. "Peni?" adds another. "Penii?" They start a heated debate on the plural of "penis," and I joyfully type my reply, certain that this time I will succeed because I have had this very conversation in real life—I have practiced!

"You know what's weird?" I type. "The plural of 'vagina.' It's 'vaginae'! Can you believe it? How weird, right? How would you even pronounce that?" The girl standing closest to me says, "ew." Everyone else rolls right along with the penis theme. This time, I'm stung because I can't even figure out what I've done wrong. The girls were having a conversation about funny plurals for genitalia, and I contributed a morsel of comical wisdom, one that could double as excellent fodder for a Scrabble game.

In real life, this works out. In real life, everyone rushes to check out the Wikipedia article on it, and Becky falls off the bed laughing at the computer's out-loud pronunciation of "vaginae." These Second Lifers seem awfully humorless, and I've exhausted my supply of charm. This has been quite enough for one day. I shut down Second Life with a renewed zeal for my coffee and room-cleanup plans.

Before I sign onto SL again, I have a conversation with an ex-girlfriend (yes, one of the computer programmers) whose internship gave her a project on the game last summer. I must have come off as bitter in my text-messaged request that we talk about this, but hours of bring degraded in a pretend universe had turned me...something less than patient. Upon meeting my ex, I demand to know "what the deal is with these people."

"What people?" Claire is amused that I'm investigating Second Life as a manner of personal research/torture device, and I think she's resolved to be patient with me while I work things out. She chews absentmindedly on a carrot stick, anticipating my answer.

"I don't know." I exhale. "These Second Life people. All the avatars seem so rude. Today, I was ostracized at a dance party, and no one seems to want to talk about anything except the nifty little gadgets they've gotten for the game."

Claire suggests that I may be on the wrong island. Many of the SL habitats she's observed, she says, have been veritable "ghost towns," visited only by restless techies looking for another place to talk shop. I'm disappointed, though—this is L Word Island! I had been promised an abundance of beautiful women, a lively culture of discussion and thought, dance parties on the beach! Where was my politically progressive orgy?

Clearly, I'd been expecting too much. More curious than ever about what compels folks to start an alternate existence when it can't even be guaranteed to come with decent conversation, I return to the Island. I will be patient this time, I promise myself. I will enter chats simply by saying "hello" or stating my name, not by showing off the glib verbal parlor tricks that I use to get by in real life. I'll keep it simple.

My first target is a group of young men and women sitting around a table at the Planet. I approach slowly. "Hi."

A girl who had been saying something about motorcycles turns around. "Hi, Reine," she says. "Where r u from?"

"I live in Boston," I say. We have a short and largely uninteresting conversation about precipitate slush and its capacity to eat away at denim, at the end of which I plan on asking her if she's ever considered buying a pair of those "Invisible Threads" jeans. Before I get the chance, she (her nametag says "Polly") decides to go for a slice of cake. Remembering that I don't want to spend any money in this world, I excuse myself and start walking away.

As I go, I begin to notice that I'm gaining speed, and suddenly, my avatar rockets into the air. Within seconds, she's shooting off of L Word Island, over an ocean, and into a private area of the SL universe with transparent red tape marked "Do not cross." I'm flabbergasted. I try to get Reine to walk somewhere, anywhere, even back into the ocean, but before I can regain my bearings, she's flying all over the map, gleefully ignoring my commands (spoken now as well as typed) to slow down. I quit.

Claire is amused to hear it. "Did you try pressing F?" she asks.

"F," I repeat after a pause. "Well, oddly, it wasn't the farthest letter from my mind during the whole episode..."

"This might help, too." She sends me a link, via email, to a document that was designed for newbies like me to help us acquire a logistical orientation to Second Life. It's over a hundred pages long. The first and lengthiest section, the one that details how to get an avatar to move properly, is preceded by the following caveat: "You may want to make note of these instructions somewhere, because memorizing them could be overwhelming." Fantastic. In my cynicism, I wonder whether Second Life might be a haven for those who rue having learned basic motor functions instinctually and suffer from a burning desire to make everything, even moving, into a rigorous intellectual process.

But I'm also eager for something to do besides actually playing SL, so I grab a pen and start jotting down notes on the process of moving my avatar. I write step-by-step explanations of how to do things like walk diagonally, dance, run, and swim while being chased, should such a need arise. At some wee hour of the night, I complete my notes, a lengthy compendium of instructions on how to make Reine work that I've supplemented with hand-drawn diagrams. I am indestructible.

So I go back to Second Life and play for a bleary-eyed 45 minutes. During my time in-world, I unsuccessfully flirt with a girl in the Planet, find out why I'd been unable to hear the music on the dance floor (for whatever reason, I'd turned the settings on my game to "mute"), and walk, without any mishaps, down the length of the Island.

Things are looking stable, so I sign out, having long ago exhausted the quota of time I felt like spending on Second Life today. Meanwhile, the sun has come up. Putting on my coat to go outside for the first time in at least 48 hours, I wonder what kind of learning experience I'm getting from this game. The energy involved just in keeping an avatar functioning and on her feet for a day is already way too much to spend on a life that's not even real. I went into this project wanting to find out what the people of the SL community are all about, but I can't even manage to talk to any of them for more than five minutes at a time.

Whatever motivations do exist for people to play this game, I seem entirely powerless to find them. What's worse, I'm starting not to care. For over a fortnight, I've obsessed over shaping, moving, conditioning, and understanding a tiny and gorgeous version of myself who's done nothing but run amok in this glorified lesbian chatroom with a swimming pool. I feel as though I still don't know my character: there's no room for her story to develop, no place for the streaming internal narrative that I consider the backbone of my real life.

When I began working on my SL, I had longish, rounded fingernails; I look down now to see that they've all been bitten to nubs in one moment of anxiety or another. I realize that I haven't been responding to email for days, I've been skipping social events to read up on the latest Second Life crazes, and I've been tormenting the few people I have had the chance to see with a constant battery of questions like, "Why do people want to play that game, anyway?" Enough is enough. It is time for the experiment to end. Delighted with the resolution to keep my relationship with real life an exclusive one, I head around the corner to the coffee shop, poised to begin this day as the first in a while I'd spend living entirely in this world.

I'd like to say that after my coffee, I will go home and return to my old life with rejuvenated enthusiasm for its trivialities. I'd love to wax rhapsodic and insist that my little anthropological project on how the other half pretends to live has left me with a zest for my household chores and my record collection. Slowing down and re-examining the basics of life, after all, has been hailed as the quintessential exercise in appreciating detail. But if this process has made me mindful of anything, it's the joy of certain types of complexity that can only come with real life. I find myself growing excited about all manner of abstract concepts that I'd forgotten while learning how to walk on L Word Island, things like intellectual curiosity and romantic desire, cognitive dissonance and déjà vu. I want my inner narrative to start up again, chronicling my psychological life in addition to basic stats like my location, my time, and how many lindens I have left. I long to reconnect with my personal complications. Perhaps these exist in a realm as unreal as Reine's world—after all, their manifestation is no more material or concrete than the electronic cups of coffee served in the Planet Café. But given the option to live out a Second Life anywhere I wanted, I'd choose the tangled little world in my head, even if it doesn't come with an Events tab.