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This book aims to provide insights into how ‘second lives’ in the sense of virtual identities and communities are constructed textually, semiotically and discursively, specifically in the online environment Second Life and Massively Multiplayer Online Games such as World of Warcraft. The book’s philosophy is multi-disciplinary and its goal is to explore the question of how we as gamers and residents of virtual worlds construct alternative online realities in a variety of ways. Of particular significance to this endeavour are conceptions of the body in cyberspace and of spatiality, which manifests itself in ‘natural’ and built environments as well as the triad of space, place and landscape. The contributors’ disciplinary backgrounds include media, communication, cultural and literary studies, and they examine issues of reception and production, identity, community, gender, spatiality, natural and built environments using a plethora of methodological approaches ranging from theoretical and philosophical contemplation through social semiotics to corpus-based discourse analysis.

Various depictions of the Vietnam veteran in films such as \"Glory Boy,\" \"The Deer Hunter,\" \"Platoon\" and \"Rambo: First Blood, Part II\" are discussed. Veterans have been portrayed as \"wounded heroes,\" \"supermen\" and \"the innocent killer.\"

This chapter considers a spatial-temporal model that builds space and place out of experience and design. It explores the possibility that, like the physical space described by Doreen Massey, space of a virtual world is created by events, rather than being merely a location where events occur. One way to avoid the issue of the spatialisation of space and place is to shut the eyes and listen, following the lead of R. Murray Schafer in his study of aural landscapes, The Soundscape. Schafer attempts to classify the parts of the environment created by sound and identifies three aspects of what he refers to as the ‘soundscape’: keynote sounds, soundmarks, and sound signals. Prince of Persia uses a specific and identifiable visual style which distinguishes it from other games, although it retains a noticeable similarity to those which also use the Scimitar game engine, such as Assassin’s Creed.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides an insight into how ‘Second Lives’ in the sense of virtual identities and communities are constructed textually. It provides a theoretical investigation of Second Life as nation through the lens of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. The book then explores essential questions of authorship, control, and agency. It also provides exploration of gender and the body in Second Life and Entropia Universe against the backdrop of postmodern and post-postmodern feminist theory. In seeking to demonstrate how human presence is constructed in virtual worlds, the book addresses a pivotal concern surrounding the recent growth in massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds: the experience of presence when moving between real and virtual space. It presents an innovative and rigorous methodology for studying the discursive construction of female characters in online and offline gaming environments.