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Good game writing is not very different from good travel writing. Somehow you must communicate the incommunicable, translating your experience in a foreign world to someone who has not yet and may never see the things that you have seen. This parallel becomes obvious once you get into writing about virtual worlds and MMOs. It's one thing to talk about Azeroth or Norrath to someone with a level 60 foozle killer, but entirely another to write for a popular audience.

Perhaps this is a job best left to tourists, and Tim Guest's "Second Lives" is one of the best travelogues through virtual living spaces that you'll find. Guest takes his time describing what a virtual world is, who the players are, and how getting immersed in this digital reality can alter how you see the real world.

As the title suggests, the bulk of Guest's work is spent describing his experiences in Second Life, the virtual world from Linden Labs that has been the object of great attention from the mainstream media and almost as great derision from the hardcore gaming audience. Guest encounters an avatar controlled in sequence by a group of severely disabled adults, an overly theatrical wannabe mob boss and one of the infamous Something Awful griefers who invaded the game and provoked calls to the FBI.

Guest does spend time with other games. The space piracy of Eve Online and the Korean phenomenon Lineage 2 get significant mention. The 800-pound gorilla World of Warcraft is conspicuous in its near absence, relegated to passing mentions. As bizarre as that sounds, it makes perfect sense the way the book is structured, because Guest is not interested in success or popularity as much as he is in the transformative powers of virtual worlds. So the fact that Eve has seen epic criminal heists is more important than truck ads that use WoW avatars.

This also explains his obsession with Second Life, a game run by a company whose insistence on good vibes and loyalty reminds the author of the commune on which he lived as a child. It is a world that promises almost everything to the user who wants to escape his "first life." Familiar to most gamers as a haven for sexual fetishes and politicians or corporations that want to look hip, Guest finds a community fiercely protective of the island they inhabit, an island of wish fulfillment where the lame walk, where the escort becomes a real estate millionaire, and where everyone is hotter than in real life.

Like a good travelogue, this is participant observer journalism and Guest is soon sucked into Second Life as it consumes more and more of his attention. He wants to try everything. He sets up an office. He solicits an online prostitute. He gets hired out as a virtual hit man, assigned to trick a troublesome player into admitting that he has violated the Terms of Service. Throughout the early going, Guest seems thrilled by Second Life's potential.

Not that there aren't culture clashes. He interviews a Second Life "griefer" who can't understand why people don't appreciate his performance art pranks; it's a game, isn't it? Who would take this seriously? Fear of corporate intrusion into Second Life leads to small-scale protests, even though it is apparent from both Guest's anecdotes and subsequent events that most corporations have no idea how to use the virtual world to leverage their brands. He also notes a huge difference in how Koreans and gamers in the West treat their virtual worlds; for many Koreans, the virtual self is an extension of the real self, not something to be resurrected after death or remade over and over