Allegory of the Prim In which Plato predicts the circumstances of #SecondLife I was recently asked in the Virtual Education Journal the very poignant question � Why are you here? � � as in, why is it that I am in virtual worlds in general, and Second Life. My answer was not the common one (as usual), but included the precursor to a bigger story which I�ll summarize here. It�s not a cave, exactly� but I�m sure there�s a cave on this island somewhere. When I was a teenager, I had my first introduction to virtual worlds just as they were starting to make a name for themselves. This was back in the days when the Internet was defined by things like AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve. It was a strange existence by comparison to the flat and bulky experience of the BBS and Online Service, and it really captured my imagination. Here we were, not just existing with a couple of degrees of separation, but in a three dimensional space in real time! ...