Robbie Cooper has been a photojournalist for 15 years, working for publications such as the (London) Sunday Times Magazine, Le Monde, Geo magazine in Germany, The New York Times Magazine, GQ and Esquire. He has covered stories on the civil war and famine in Somalia, diamond dealing in Sierra Leone, elections in South Africa, Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt, the French Foreign Legion and big game hunting in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Alter Ego has been exhibited internationally.

In 2003 I was prompted, by a chance meeting, to read a little about the economies of virtual worlds. Otherwise known as “persistent worlds”, these are computer games where the game world exists online, players simply log in and out from wherever they are. An economist by the name of Ted Castronova had done a study of a fictional country inside the game “Ultima Online”, and worked out that the GDP of this “country” was about the same as Namibia’s. The digital items that make up the game world were being bought and sold for real money. The interaction of huge numbers of people within the game world was creating effects that we’re all very familiar with in the real world. For example; competition for social status, conflict, crime, resource depletion and the formation of large gangs and groups within the games, who impose their own internal order. These are not games that any one person can win, but the urge to compete was fuelling a trade in virtual game items, that today is worth more than a billion dollars a year and is growing fast.

It seemed both counter-intuitive and fascinating that people could create wealth by playing computer games, and that the unreal, even idealistic, world of a computer game could be penetrated by reality. Over the next three years I met people who played games for a living in sweatshops in China, a virtual estate agent who claimed to have made a million real dollars, a man who re-mortgaged his real house to buy a virtual nightclub and countless other people who live more in the virtual world than the real one. The digital identities that they created were often a reflection of their dreams or intentions in the virtual world. Together, they spoke of the precarious balance between hope and delusion that we all face in the modern world. In the most extreme cases, people have killed others over virtual game items, or died after playing for days without eating or sleeping. A world that seems free of limitations can be extremely seductive. Both to the players and to the creators of these “places”- as Phillip Rosedale, creator of “Second life” told me, “I wanted to create a digital version of reality, and specifically wanted to make a place where many people could build things together and generally explore their imaginations. As thinking beings, we can imagine a world much better than the real one. Second Life lets us actually build that imagined place.”