XXX.exe

Playing Second Life is the virtual equivalent of having a secret life. Instead of (or perhaps as well as) visiting the brothels, gay bars and tranny shacks of the real world, Second Lifers let their digital freak flags fly, cavorting with bizarre avatars, playing out their weirdest fantasies in a space beyond the expectations of normality, cloaked in total anonymity.That part makes sense; after all, wanting to make love to fox headed Aphrodites in your spare time is certainly no weirder than yearning to crush gnomes with a hammer as a big, green Orc.

An article in Wired, though, hipped us to a new Second Life craze that makes absolutely no sense at all - virtual porn. According to the article, a man named Thomas Struszka began an entirely in-game magazine called Slustler to feature the realm's denizens in risque and sexually explicit screenshots.

Says Struszka, "I want people to be in the magazine as they are in-world, not as Playboy-styled, plastic products in exclusive packaging." Never mind the fact that the guy is a virtual pornographer. Never mind that even he thinks Playboy is too artificial. The most mind-bendingly perverse phenomenon in the video game industry is the fact that the guy sells his work to other people in-game.

Even in their fantasies, people buy porn.