From newsweek.com:

Lillie and Hawkins met four years ago atop a waterfall overlooking a lush green valley—the kind of magical tableau you find only in romance novels, or in sophisticated virtual universes. The two had stumbled upon each other in Second Life, the 3-D computer world where nearly a million people log in regularly, communicating via digital representations of themselves, or avatars. Hawkins’s avatar was tall (very tall: 7 feet 8), with darkened eyes and a towering white Mohawk. But it was his boots that caught Lillie’s eye: black, ornamented, dazzling. "The most intricate boots I’d ever seen," she says. Lillie, whose own avatar is porcelain-skinned, with white or black hair depending on her mood, was thunderstruck. "Heart Wishbringer" (that’s her avatar’s name) and "Joe Stravinsky" (that’s his) spent the next three weeks online together, chatting for hours via IM. Then, before they’d ever seen or heard each other’s real voices, they got "married" in Second Life, like 43,000 other couples, typing their vows while their avatars stood atop the waterfall where they first met. Then Heart and Joe stripped down to their naked digital bodies and swam in the crisp pool of water below.

From businessinsider.com:

Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, announced today a range of new measures meant to finally confine Second Life’s sprawling adult community to a virtual "red light district." Among the new rules going into effect soon are:

* All adult goods and services will be confined to a specific "geographic" area in Second Life, meaning (we think) virtual genitalia and bdsm gear will no longer be offered in Second Life’s malls next to the shoes and custom hairstyles.
* Second Life’s search engine will filter out adult-related ads. (Although we imagine people will try to game the system.)
* Access to adult areas will be restricted to users who go through an age verification process. Linden first proposed age verification mid-2007 amidst a "virtual child pornography" scandal, but the program was never really enforced.

From blogs.telegraph.co.uk:

The danger here is that “lads”, at a formative age, aren’t getting a real experience of young women (nor are they getting an experience of real young women). They are entering a virtual sexual world. This is, of course, the nature of fantasy, but so long as there were only soft-porn, top-shelf mags, adolescent boys might be made sufficiently curious to go and find out what a real girl is like, as it were, in the flesh.

…

The trouble with on-line porn is that it invites the viewer in, rather than to look beyond it. Any parent who has watched how a teenager can become hooked to computer-screen life will know what I mean. They go to their room and start to experience life almost exclusively through their PC, rather than out into the street and in person.

It’s like the avatar games on-line, such as Second Life, which have reportedly caused divorce as a consequence of on-line infidelity. If you start to live a marriage in virtual reality, the real one withers. Put your sex life on-line and the same happens.

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From cornellsun.com:

Amy Taylor and Dave Pollard are both players of the virtual world aptly named “Second Life”, a virtual game world where people can create avatars and do day-to-day activities like hanging out with friends and attending concerts. She is 28. He is 40. Both are disabled. They met in a chat room in 2003 and were married in 2005, first in a lavish, tropical ceremony in “Second Life” itself and then in a registry office.

The kicker here is that Taylor says the only adultery committed was virtual. “He never did anything in real life,” Taylor said, “but I had my suspicions about what he was doing in Second Life.”

She also said that , she had caught him using his Second Life avatar to have sex with another player’s avatar. Then last year, she says she caught him using his avatar to have sex with (I am not making this up) a virtual prostitute. She forgave him, and then found him committing virtual adultery again this past April.

That changed recently when, according to Taylor, she found him flirting with another Second Life player. “I caught him cuddling a woman on a sofa in the game,” Taylor said. “It looked really affectionate. He confessed he’d been talking to this woman player in America for one or two weeks, and said our marriage was over and he didn’t love me any more.”

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From dailymail.co.uk:

But while celebrities and politicians fell over themselves to endorse it and the corporate world queued up to grab a slice of this brand-new market, it also started to be cynically abused and exploited by paedophiles, adulterers and porn addicts.

For behind the hype and the headlines, there’s a profoundly worrying underbelly to Second Life.

Far from being a harmless fantasy world, it is a cyber-society where conventional morality has been set aside in favour of a far darker and more worrying pattern of behaviour.

Obsessed with sex and awash with pornography, it is a ‘place’ where the behaviour of some of its ‘residents’ is so deeply unedifying it beggars belief that it could ever have been hailed as a lighthearted retreat from the real world.

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From cbc.ca:

British newspapers say an Internet affair in the online community Second Life has shattered a real-life marriage in England.

Reports say 28-year-old Amy Taylor and 40-year-old David Pollard of Newquay in southwest England split after she spotted her husband’s online alter-ego cuddling with a virtual home wrecker.

But while their flesh and blood marriage has disintegrated, both say they are still looking to the Internet for love.

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