Window Seats

Newsweek, May, 2007 by Emily Flynn Vencat

The sun is shining and the waves are lapping at the sand. Just beyond the lounge chairs and palm trees, a gaggle of beautiful people with perfect tans and lush hair gyrate to music wafting from a pair of seaside speakers. It is, in short, a dream holiday. What's more, it's free, 100 percent ecofriendly and available any time to anyone with a broadband connection.

Old-fashioned travelers might bristle at the fact that this is a cyberspace beach resort, and the beauties dancing on the sand are actually the animated avatars of people sitting behind computer screens (and probably wearing sweat pants). But to the more than 5 million players in the absorbing world of the online game Second Life (SL), where the shimmering oasis exists, this is nothing less than a real vacation. Cyber-resorts, they argue, come with all the escapist benefits of any real-world holiday: a ...