ABSTRACT
The world of Second Life is an example of a persistent and immersive multiuser virtual environment (MUVE) that generates a sense of being inside the world (Blascovich and Bailenson 2011), hence the embodied experience of being there together with other actors and their avatars (Schroeder 2011). In Second Life, the sense of being there inside a world results from metaphors of worldliness and from the many scripted animations of the world that are meant to generate the movement and change so characteristic of the experience of living in a world. This worldliness of Second Life is mediated by visual and spatial metaphors of land and sea, islands and mainland, corners of the world, sunrise and sunset, virtual places and square meters, by the notion of residents and inhabitants and by animated avatars that travel and teleport around and between places and islands. These metaphors and animations organize the conception and perception of the multiuser virtual environment, and they produce a sense of the virtual environment as if it were a world.
