Virtual worlds taking over?

"These days, kids are so into social networking sites that their parents have to get Bebo accounts just to call them down to dinner," says Keith Stuart in his Guardian UK "Gamesblog."

Dude's got a point, especially when he starts listing figures:

"..combine social networking, gaming and youth-friendly virtual living into one experience and you're practically mainlining your brand into the eyeballs of a whole generation. [This] is certainly what Mattel had in mind when it set up Barbie Girls, an online community based around the popular dolls, which attracted 3 million users within 60 days of its launch. It's on more than 10 million now - impressive, but dwarfed by the massively multiplayer animal-rearing community Neopets and its 45 million pet owners."

And now everyone's cashing in, Disney with Club Penguin, Nickelodeon with SpongeBob, and Monkey World, a homegrown property.

As mentioned previously, the games will soon be seeing plenty of advertising within as well. I can't think of any way to word it better than Canadian writer and economist Stephen Leacock did once, so here it is:

"Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it."

It's a strange world we've made for ourselves, that's for sure. I'm willing to meet those on the other side of the fence halfway though, at least in the meantime, so, I'll put up with internet ads and whatever else to some extent. We writers need to live! It's kind of unfortunate we have to essentially depend on ads to make everything work, but the way I figure it, if you're wise enough to it, you're not going to go out and buy a bajillion things after you've spent a couple hours online. Honestly, I don't get the psychological effects of advertising at all, and sometimes I just have to laugh at the system.

But, I'm getting a little off topic here. Back to the point: Jon Stewart of the Daily Show recently did something on Second Life and the first Congressional hearing within the virtual world. Here's his take on it (sorry, couldn't find the video anywhere but Youtube):

I'm half-agreed with Stewart. There is some truth in his jabs (Congress being out of touch, for one), but, well, in theory, couldn't we get more done using these virtual worlds? Of course, if there's some way for these things to get hacked, then we're really in trouble.

Anyway, I think the question here is, with the increasingly massive popularity of these games, at what point does it become dangerous? And what does it mean when we spend more time in them than with our real lives? Which world is most "real" then? Oooh, metaphysical!