The Existential Crisis of Avatars - by Doc Nolan

So why are we active in AMV?  In some cases, to overcome loneliness and isolation, but in others, it is to escape from "real life." Why would people do that?  Some find dealing with large groups of people overwhelming and very stressful and prefer the simplicity of nature.  Nature?  Yes, that's paradoxical since our virtual worlds are creations of our highly complex human civilization and of very sophisticated hardware and software.  But perhaps that's key.  We are caught up in a vast and complicated social machine (civilization) that we can't control.  We forget that our bodies and minds evolved in a different, ever-distant world: that of the hunter-gatherer in which the human race evolved over eons.  So we huddle over our 21^st-century substitutes for campfires (our monitors), gaze into them, and escape.   I suspect this is especially true for those trapped in cities who live amid millions simply because it's where the vagaries of life placed them.  Given the stresses of urban life, we isolate ourselves from the craziness outside our homes, much as monks or hermits might.  It might seem eccentric and silly to escape from "reality" when one logs in to AMV.

Even more so when, via his avatar, one sits in a landscape void of people simply enjoying an artificial "natural world " that only lives on a server in some distant place.  But there's a flip side to that.  In RL, some people watch television screens following actors who have memorized the words of some unknown writer.  Is that reality?  And what about "the news"?   What has anyone learned on television (or via the press) about crime in Upper Volta or the funeral of a factory worker in Bangladesh?  Aren't those things as real as the doings of celebrities?  We all live in a world of fantasies.  The ones you and I inhabit in AMV are not any more or less real than those other ones.  

At least that's one take.  Assuming you who are reading this are real people and not just carbon-based shadows of the people I know in AMV.