In his book Secondary Worlds, W. H. Auden wrote that "present in every human being are two desires, a desire to know the truth about the primary world ... and the desire to make new secondary worlds of our own or, if we cannot make them ourselves, to share in the secondary worlds of those who can". Auden, in 1968, was writing about literature, not cyberspace, but his thoughts help explain why virtual worlds are popular today. The conflicts that arise from this desire to live in both a primary world and a secondary world removed from physical reality are examined in Coming of Age in Second Life. Anthropologist Tom Boellstorff paints an ethnographic portrait of the online virtual world, Second Life, that is fully immersed in its subject. To prove that virtual worlds are cultures in their own right, Boellstorff conducted all his research from within Second Life, using the ethnographer's toolkit of interviews, focus groups and participant observation. Unlike other studies that take an outside perspective, he made no attempt to make real-life contact with his fellow residents.
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