A Second Life.....?

These days the coolest things online are MMORPGs. To those of you unfamiliar with that abbreviation, it means Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Thanks to the booming market for Internet connections (I won't call them broadband connections, cause that'd be a disgrace...) this phenomena has now slowly and steadily started taking over the virtual horizon.

The point of this style of gaming is to provide players with a virtual persona, that lives in a virtual world. These games have not only taken the World Market by storm, they've even become huge business hubs. The games heading this revolution across the globe seem to be Second Life and The World of Warcraft.

These games have provided a new horizon for exploration..... That of our own creativity!! Though this world is just as competitive as the real world, you can easily carve out a niche for yourself here...!! The general level of comfort/need of the netizens with this genre of gaming has intensified over the past few years, thanks to the increase in the commercial viability of these supposed tools for whiling away one's time.

Today they provide us with an alternative lifestyle wherein there are no real restrictions to what we can achieve. They've also managed to create quite a few millionaires out of us common people. If you are artistic or creative in anyway, or even if you have great idea that you'd like to sell.... you can earn money........ loads and loads of money......!! And, by money I don't just mean virtual currency within the game's universe... I mean real hard cash....!! The kind that you can actually hold onto and use to buy your groceries, to pay your bills and to even buy yourself a new house or a new car!!!

But, herein come the problems... is so much of something a good thing?? Why can't man spend more time socialising physicially than virtually?? Will the advent of this era in the virtual world result into the creation of a Matrix like pseudo-world where people will willingly give up their freedom to choose to become a part of an artificial environment?? Do we want to lead that completely doctored life?? That 'perfect' life that a virtual environment like this can provide us with?? Are the strides we are taking in this direction really an improvement??

These are questions of a very personal nature... But, very important nevertheless cause they just might just change our future forever!!