http://biz.yahoo.com/wallstreet/070810/sb118670164592393622_id.html?.v=6
Here is an excerpt:
The woman he's legally wed to is not amused. "It's really devastating," says Sue Hoogestraat, 58, an export agent for a shipping company, who has been married to Mr. Hoogestraat for seven months. "You try to talk to someone or bring them a drink, and they'll be having sex with a cartoon."
Mr. Hoogestraat plays down his online relationship, assuring his wife that it's only a game. While many busy people can't fathom the idea of taking on another set of commitments, especially imaginary ones, Second Life and other multiplayer games are moving into the mainstream. With some 30 million people now involved world-wide, there is mounting concern that some are squandering, even damaging their real lives by obsessing over their "second" ones. That's always been a concern with videogames, but a field of study suggests that the boundary between virtual worlds and reality may be more porous than experts previously imagined.
Nearly 40% of men and 53% of women who play online games said their virtual friends were equal to or better than their real-life friends, according to a survey of 30,000 gamers conducted by Nick Yee, a recent Ph.D. graduate from Stanford University. More than a quarter of gamers said the emotional highlight of the past week occurred in a computer world, according to the survey, which was published in 2006 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press's journal Presence.
This is just another article that brings to life the RL debate about how important SL should be in comparison to your RL. Is Second Life just a game?
Without getting into a length post, this is a small part of my point of view. For a lot of people SL is not just a game. Sometimes it can be very hard to keep your emotions from becoming involved with SL friends or those that have become partners. It's understandable for people who might spend many hours in world. But, I think that it's ok as long as they can honestly tell their RL partners that it is just a game, they can separate their SL creation with their RL and they can still function in the RL without SL becoming wrapped up in it.
