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Born too late to be 1920's flappers, a teaching colleague and I posed in bright red, fringed shifts and feathery boas for a fun memento during an outing with students to Great America. Even with its historic backdrop and sepia tones, our recent photo will never be considered authentic, obviously.

For many decades, humans have enjoyed re-creating lives or events from the past, whether through stories, films, or even live re-enactments on historic sites, perhaps. For some psychological, emotional or escapist desire, we want to go back in time and visit, at least vicariously. Nothing new in that.

What's new in the last few years is the ability to go forward or past physical boundaries into an alternate reality and live in a world which has never before existed. Only since the inception of video games, complete with avatars (characters), settings and plot lines, connected to the internet has this been possible.

As early as the 1960's computer programmers working on huge mainframes for universities and large corporations side-tracked for fun and designed the first games played on computers usually involving outer space (Spacewar! Space Travel). Before long, you could play these on coin-operated machines in arcades, while Atari started its Pong craze. Before the end of the 1970's, video gamers enjoyed story lines and could become more involved as a player in the game.

Popular games like Pac-man and Dungeons and Dragons survived a computer "crash" in 1977, making it into the second generation of video gaming. Better home computer products, plus the Nintendo Entertainment System carried video action to consumers throughout the 80's with several Japanese designers like Sony and Nokia making inroads to American homes via joysticks. Moving into the "seventh generation" of video gaming, other companies from all over the world combine to cash in on this burgeoning industry.

Some brave new players actually turn a profit, along with the video game companies, since these games intersect virtual worlds using the internet. First came Project Entropia, where participants not only choose avatars, roles and the accoutrements that complete their new identities, but can become "land" owners in addition to fighting off dangerous villains and struggling through virtual nature disasters. Just can't quite find utopia, I guess, no matter how hard we try.

If you decide to "live" in your customized version of Second Life, you can also be whoever you decide a nice idea for those forlorn or

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