Social Virtual Worlds and Their Places

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This book provides a foundational look at social virtual worlds from the geographer's perspective. In the first chapter, the author examines what a social virtual world is, and how interest in these worlds has waxed and waned during the 21st Century. In Chapter 2, the author looks at how the geographer's craft can be applied to social virtual worlds, reviews the characteristics of selected social virtual worlds, and investigates the meaning of their concocted spaces. Chapter 3 provides an analysis of the key feature of the social virtual world, the avatar, focusing on its motivations and identity choices. Chapter 4 draws on the geographical understanding of place to examine where avatars live, work, and roam, and how virtual-world places resemble and diverge from actual-world places. The concluding chapter highlights the themes discussed in the preceding chapters and offers the prediction that social virtual worlds, in some form, will always be with us. Giving extra life to the subject matter is a series of vignettes that illustrate points introduced in the book. A mixed-methods survey conducted in Second Life adds additional breadth to the discussion.